Best 136 quotes of Charles Stross on MyQuotes

Charles Stross

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    Charles Stross

    A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.

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    Charles Stross

    All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

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    Charles Stross

    An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!

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    Charles Stross

    Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

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    Charles Stross

    A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?

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    Charles Stross

    Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".

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    Charles Stross

    Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?

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    Charles Stross

    Book depository is nothing new; there've been outlets selling books internationally via mail order for many decades - the only change is that it's now easier to find and use such services.

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    Charles Stross

    --but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

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    Charles Stross

    Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

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    Charles Stross

    Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, "if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?

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    Charles Stross

    [Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

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    Charles Stross

    Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

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    Charles Stross

    Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.

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    Charles Stross

    Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)

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    Charles Stross

    For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles.

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    Charles Stross

    For someone who is starting out on developing their critical skills, just being aware of its existence is great: it can make the difference between trying to write a story around a cliche or an original idea, and better still, studying it can eventually clue you in on how to breathe new life into tired tropes.

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    Charles Stross

    Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!

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    Charles Stross

    Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

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    Charles Stross

    Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?

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    Charles Stross

    Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

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    Charles Stross

    I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.

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    Charles Stross

    I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible).

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    Charles Stross

    I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.

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    Charles Stross

    I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).

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    Charles Stross

    I do not click on random youtube videos.

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    Charles Stross

    I don't do flash fiction.

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    Charles Stross

    I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)

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    Charles Stross

    I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).

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    Charles Stross

    I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

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    Charles Stross

    I don't think most of my opinions, political or social, are so far outside of the mainstream that they'd cause massive outrage on a scale liable to provoke death threats or referrals to prosecutors for outraging public decency, so why worry?

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    Charles Stross

    I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.

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    Charles Stross

    If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

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    Charles Stross

    I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.

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    Charles Stross

    If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

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    Charles Stross

    If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!

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    Charles Stross

    If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing.

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    Charles Stross

    If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.

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    Charles Stross

    I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

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    Charles Stross

    I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.

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    Charles Stross

    I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?

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    Charles Stross

    I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's appropriate to; for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.

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    Charles Stross

    I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.

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    Charles Stross

    I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.

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    Charles Stross

    I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

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    Charles Stross

    I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.

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    Charles Stross

    I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.

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    Charles Stross

    I'm an individual. I do not want to get into a pissing match with an organization that is a de-facto gigadollar-turnover multinational!

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    Charles Stross

    I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.

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    Charles Stross

    I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.