Charles Stross Quotes
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What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.
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We are, after all, homo economicus.
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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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Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
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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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Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
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The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
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Writers block: when I get it, it's because my subconscious spotted that I'd make a huge structural mistake in constructing a novel before my conscious mind became aware of it, and threw on the brakes. So I've learned not to sweat it: take two days off, then back up a chapter, read through, and try to work out why I'm suddenly uneasy about continuing.
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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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I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.
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Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.
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What I've learned during my life is that the near future is 90% identical to the present - if you buy a new car today, it'll probably still be on the road in 2022.
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I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.
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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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I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.
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I suspect losing paper maps but gaining GPS and online maps is a similar step function: maps still exist, but they're vastly more useful, not to say permanently up to date, in their new form. Again, I won't be shedding any tears, but I'll keep a paper road atlas in the back of my car for another few years, I think, Just In Case.
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It's usually quite easy to shrug and write something else instead.
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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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Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.
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I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist.
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Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.
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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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I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)
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My agent is based in New York. And due to a historic accident, my publishing track is primarily American - I'm sold into the UK almost as a foreign import! So I'm quite out of touch with what's going on in UK publishing.
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I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.
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We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!
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The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.
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What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet.
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Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
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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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