Charles Stross Quotes

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.
Charles Stross
We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die.
Charles Stross
Only debt is forever.
Charles Stross
I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart's desire
Charles Stross
Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided--for a fee. (In the event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.)
Charles Stross
Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.
Charles Stross
...A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.
Charles Stross
NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!
Charles Stross
Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse.
Charles Stross
Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration, too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet.
Charles Stross
Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.
Charles Stross
Don’t you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states."Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?
Charles Stross
There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger.
Charles Stross
Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.
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.
Charles Stross
Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.
Charles Stross
There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade. (This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: You will do as I say or I will hurt you.. . . Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade in the intersecting area in a different color and label it: dangerous. Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its won, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity -- but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.
Charles Stross
The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.
Charles Stross
Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
Charles Stross
I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.I am descended from you, and exist in your future.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
Charles Stross
This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms--translation: all your bank account are belong to us--
Charles Stross
First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life—oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.
Charles Stross
Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.
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?
Charles Stross
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Charles Stross
Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.
Charles Stross
Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it’s semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty
Charles Stross
Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.
Charles Stross
The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?
Charles Stross
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.
Charles Stross
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
Charles Stross
Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
Charles Stross
I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.
Charles Stross
The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.
Charles Stross
The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.
Charles Stross
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross
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.
Charles Stross
Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.
Charles Stross