Charles Stross: Trending quotes

“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)

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

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

“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.”

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

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

“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 …”

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

“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)

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Jennifer morgue (2007)
The Laundry Files

“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?”

“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)