Charles Stross: Trending quotes

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Charles Stross: 422 quotes3 likes

““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.””

Charles Stross book Accelerando

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

“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?”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

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

“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 Laundry Files

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files

““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.””

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 8 (“Elector”), p. 353

““Do you believe in angels, Robard?” he asked faintly.
“No, sir.”
“Well, that’s alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y’know.””

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

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

“Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 188

“The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.”

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 12, “Bag” (p. 210)

“A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.”

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 1, “Duel” (p. 1; opening line)

“Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.”

Charles Stross book Iron Sunrise

Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 10, “Murder by Numbers” (pp. 160-161)

“The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 14, “The Telephone Repairman” (p. 298)

“Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Overtime (2009)
The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014)

““Bad day at the office?”
“It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.””

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 18, “Connections” (p. 302)

“Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. “When you’ve lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 279

“Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.”

Charles Stross book Glasshouse

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

“Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 251)

“Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death—with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights—will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 3 (“Tourist”), p. 88

“Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.”

Charles Stross book Halting State

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 33, “Elaine: Gentlemen and Players” (p. 275)

“New Dresden is not a McWorld: it’s a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason—they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet”

Charles Stross book Iron Sunrise

in one another’s backs
Source: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 13, “Hold the Front Page” (pp. 200-201)

“As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 139)

“I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Curse of Laundry http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/10/the-curse-of-laundry.html, October 19, 2014 <br class="br">The Laundry Files