Charles Stross citations (211 citations)

Charles Stross: 211 citations0 J'aime

Charles Stross: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Charles Stross The Laundry Files

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

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

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Charles Stross The Atrocity Archives

Source: 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.)”

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Charles Stross The Laundry Files

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

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

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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.”

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Charles Stross

Source: Toast, and Other Stories

“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.”

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Charles Stross Saturn's Children

Source: Saturn's Children

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

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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.”

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Charles Stross livre The Fuller Memorandum

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Glasshouse

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

“Truly the jaws of irony are agape!”

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Iron Sunrise

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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?)”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

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

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Charles Stross livre 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?”

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Iron Sunrise

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre 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.””

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

“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 …”

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Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014)

“You got overdraft at the mythology bank.”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

““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.”

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

““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.””

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

““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.””

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

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écrivain américain None

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auteur-compositrice-interprète américaine None

John Green7

écrivain américain et vlogger None

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écrivain américain None

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