Charles Stross > Quotes

“Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!”
― Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

“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, Overtime

“Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.”
― Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

“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, The Fuller Memorandum

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”
― Charles Stross, Toast, and Other Stories

“Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.”
― 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.”
― Charles Stross, Saturn's Children

“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, The Fuller Memorandum

“Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...”
― charles stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“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".”
― 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, The Fuller Memorandum

“That was what we call in the trade an Unscheduled Reality Excursion, usually abbreviated to ‘Oh fuck.’ ”
― Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

“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, Accelerando

“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, Singularity Sky

“Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?”
― Charles Stross, Accelerando

“The male ego is a curious thing. It’s about the size of a small continent but it’s extremely brittle.”
― Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

“The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.”
― Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart

“I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.”
― Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart

“Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...”
― Charles Stross, Saturn's Children

“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, Accelerando

“In memory of Terry Pratchett,
who showed us all how it’s done”
― Charles Stross, The Nightmare Stacks

“Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.”
― Charles Stross, Overtime

“We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.”
― Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart

“Let’s see.’ She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. ‘You’re in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.'
I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly.”
― Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex

“They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.”
― Charles Stross, Halting State

“My computer terminal whistles at me: YOU HAVE MAIL. No shit, Sherlock, I always have mail. It's an existential thing: if I don't have mail it would mean that something is very wrong with the world”
― Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

“[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]”
― Charles Stross, Accelerando

“You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default.”
― Charles Stross, The Apocalypse Codex