Charles Stross Quotes

“The first rule of space travel…is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.”

Classified Appendix (p. 354)
The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012)

“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.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 4, “The Admiral’s Man” (p. 72; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Charles Stross book The Fuller Memorandum

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 2, “Pointing the Finger” (p. 32)

“Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.”

Charles Stross

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

Charles Stross The Atrocity Archives

Source: The Atrocity Archives

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

Charles Stross

Source: Toast, and Other Stories

Charles Stross Quotes about time

“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts. “It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter—that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –”
“Manfred?”

“Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years …”

He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.
Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 8 (“Elector”), pp. 347-348

“The first time Wednesday saw a flag she had to look away, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Patriotism had never been a huge Muscovite virtue, and to see the way the fat woman in the red pants held on to her flag as if it were a life preserver made Wednesday want to slap her and yell Grow up! It’s all over! Except it also felt like…like watching Jerm, aged three, playing with the pewter pot containing Grandpa’s ashes. Abuse of the dead, an infection of history.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), pp. 38-39

“Time travel destabilizes history.
History is a child of contingency; so many events depend on critical misunderstandings or transient encounters that even the apocryphal butterfly’s wing is apt to stir up a storm in short order.”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 17, “Set Us Up the Bomb” (pp. 277-278)

“No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 8, “Confessions” (p. 177)

“You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I’d never have time to do anything else.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 1, “Liz: Red Pill, Blue Pill” (p. 16)

“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.)”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 15, “Recovery” (p. 255)

Charles Stross: Trending quotes

“Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.”

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files
Source: Overtime

Charles Stross The Atrocity Archives

Source: The Atrocity Archives

“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

Source: Saturn's Children

Charles Stross Quotes

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

“Truly the jaws of irony are agape!”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 13, “Climb” (p. 224)

“And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (p. 157)

“Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 2, “Out of the Frying Pan” (p. 45)

“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? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 201

““You have an evil mind!”
“And this is a bad thing how, exactly?””

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 4 (“Halo”), pp. 146-147

Charles Stross book Halting State

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 28, “Jack: Sex Offender” (p. 235)

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

“You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)

“Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse—an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling—so the tribe could work collectively—and then reflexively, to simulate the individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus—signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 229)

“People didn’t always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), p. 397

“Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 15, “Preparing for Ghosts and Dogs” (pp. 245-246)

“I’m not going to make the mistake of appealing to your patriotism: It’s a deflating currency these days, and an ambiguous one. But I would like to put a word in for ethics, fair play, and enlightened self-interest.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 9, “Diplomatic Behavior” (p. 198)

Charles Stross book Halting State

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 33, “Elaine: Gentlemen and Players” (p. 274)

““I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?
A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?”
Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.””

“Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,
The transom was shut, the staff home in repose;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
But St. Nicholas won’t be coming because this is a Designated National Security Site within the meaning of Para 4.12 of Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act (Amended) and unauthorised intrusion on such a site is an arrestable offense …”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 143)

“You got overdraft at the mythology bank.”

The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014)

““Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example…have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 15, “Delivery Service” (p. 329)

““Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”
“Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t understand it.””

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 287-288)

“Unfortunately, it appeared that she was going to be around when they learned the hard way that interstellar wars of aggression were much easier to lose than to win.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 1 (“Lobsters”), pp. 14-15

““Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.””

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 8, “Confessions” (p. 188)

“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.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), pp. 396-397

“Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 132)

“Here we are, sixty something human minds. We’ve been migrated—while still awake—right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 10, “Liz: Snowballing Hell” (p. 116)

“Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents—God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke (the Eschaton didn’t count, having explicitly denied that it was a deity)—and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 184

“Any job I do—if it doesn’t work, somebody pays. Possibly hundreds or thousands of somebodies. That’s the price of good engineering; nobody notices you did your job right.”

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 18, “Grateful Dead” (p. 294)

““Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. “Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable; sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!””

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 5, “Wolf Depository Incident” (p. 127)

“But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that’s what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we?”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 144)

“Ultimately, it was easier to change the subject than think the unthinkable.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 8 (“Elector”), p. 356

“I killed you! And you didn’t even notice!”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 13, “Jokers” (p. 280)

“A curious horror overtook him, then. His skin crawled; the back of his neck turned damp and cold. I can’t go yet, he thought. It’s not fair! He shuddered. The void seemed to speak to him. Fairness has nothing to do with it. This will happen, and your wishes are meaningless.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 14, “Hospital” (p. 235)

“Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 12, “Bouncers” (p. 257)

“Can I remember— “I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 12, “Toymaker: Reality Excursion” (p. 143)

“I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.”

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 15, “Recovery” (p. 250)

““We have a problem, sir.”
“What do you mean, a problem?” demanded the Admiral. “We’re not supposed to have problems—that’s the enemy’s job!””

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 2, “Experiment” (p. 22)

“But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 7, “A Semiotic War” (p. 159)

“I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 229)

“I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (p. 279)

“They’re too literal-minded,” he said quietly. “All doing, no innovative thinking. They don’t understand metaphors well; half of them think you’re Baba Yaga returned, you know? We’ve been a, ah, stable culture too long. Patterns of belief, attitudes, get ingrained. When change comes, they are incapable of responding. Try to fit everything into their preconceived dogmas.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 8, “Confessions” (p. 183)

“She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 12, “Bouncers” (p. 253)

“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.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 72

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 266

“Just as it's possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it's possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 1 (“Lobsters”), p. 1 (quoting Edsger W. Dijkstra)

“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?”

Jennifer morgue (2007)
The Laundry Files

“She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 8 (“Elector”), p. 363

“Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 289

“Annette’s communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he’s promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.”

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 15, “Delivery Service” (p. 323)

“Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), pp. 57-58

“Manfred decides that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games.”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 20, “Liz: Bereavement Counselling” (p. 215)

““You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?” Sirhan prods. “What was it like then?”
“What was it…? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers,” she says dismissively. “We knew it would be okay.””

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 41

“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.”

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 269

““Democracy 2.0.” He shudders briefly. “I’m not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.””

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files