Charles Stross citations (211 citations, Page 2)

Charles Stross: 211 citations0 J'aime

Charles Stross: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

“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?”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Iron Sunrise

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

““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!””

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

“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?”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Iron Sunrise

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Glasshouse

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

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

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Charles Stross livre 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.”

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Charles Stross livre 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 …”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

““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!””

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

“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?”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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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?”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

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

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Charles Stross livre Singularity Sky

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Rule 34

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

“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.”

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Charles Stross livre Accelerando

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

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