Charles Stross

If life hands your research department lemons and a recipe, you shouldn’t be surprised if they make lemonade for you. Or, better still, anti-lemonade countermeasures.

— Charles Stross

And she actually looks—well, I’m not sure how to describe her. Scary is such an inadequate word, don’t you think?

— Charles Stross

The American mainstream news media have so far steered well clear of the subject because the phenomenon has been enthusiastically embraced by the talk radio fringe, leading to a death spiral of diminishing credibility.

— Charles Stross

“I’m disappointed in you, Mo: How could you imagine that the militarization of the police might be seen as a huge potential growth market by defense contractors?”“How indeed.”

— Charles Stross

“The HomeSec’s focus group will take one look at this and tell you to sex it up.”...“You know perfectly well why—...For the same reason they want a balanced team rather than a competent one. It doesn’t fit the cultural agenda they’re trying to impose.”

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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.)

— 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.

— Charles Stross

Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.

— Charles Stross

The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’être offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.

— Charles Stross

“Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?”“Female human-sized.”

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

Before the singularity, human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn’t care.Unfortunately, they were mistaken.

— Charles Stross

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

“Didn’t I have you executed last week?”“I very much doubt. It.”

— Charles Stross

Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma. Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote.

— Charles Stross

“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!”

— Charles Stross

“Do you believe in angels, Robard?” he asked faintly.“Well, that’s alright then, she must be a devil. Can deal with those, y’know.”

— Charles Stross

“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!”

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

“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?”

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism.

— Charles Stross

“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.”

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

It was a lousy plan, the only thing to commend it being the fact that all the alternatives were worse.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

“A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan.”

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

You got overdraft at the mythology bank.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

“He’s an artist,” she said calmly. “I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe—shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction.”

— Charles Stross

Er, I can’t confirm or deny, but that’s a good guess.

— Charles Stross

Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance.

— Charles Stross

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

I wasn’t exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It’s a survival trait on New Dresden; they’ve been breeding for paranoia for centuries.

— Charles Stross

It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and—stripped of the ability to get drunk on it—wine was just sour grape juice.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

“Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, kid. All the time. It’s about the only rule that explains how fucked-up this universe is.” A wan smile crept across her face. “Nobody is a villain in their own head, are they? We all know we’re doing the right thing, which is why we’re in this mess.”

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

“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.”

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds.

— Charles Stross

His ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

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?)

— Charles Stross

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.

— Charles Stross

“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.”

— Charles Stross

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

“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

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.

— Charles Stross

“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

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?

— Charles Stross

The turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.

— Charles Stross

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

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

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

In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.

— Charles Stross

I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

— Charles Stross

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

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

— Charles Stross

“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

Adams fancies himself as a big swinging dick in risk analytics: Leave out the “big” and “swinging” and he’s right.

— Charles Stross

You know there’s no advantage to be gained by murdering idiots—it doesn’t teach the idiot anything and it might give onlookers the idea that you take them seriously.

— Charles Stross

It’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.

— Charles Stross

There used to be an old joke in role-playing circles—it isn’t funny these days—that there were only a thousand real people in the UK—everybody else was a non-player character. Now it’s pretty much the reverse.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it.

— Charles Stross

Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.

— Charles Stross

Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties.

— Charles Stross

Truly the jaws of irony are agape!

— Charles Stross

“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.

— Charles Stross

Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

— Charles Stross

Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid.

— Charles Stross

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

“Am I making myself clear?”I sit down again. “Yes, for very bureaucratic values of clear.”

— Charles Stross

“Fred was a waste of airspace and one of the most powerful bogon emitters in the Laundry.”“Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again. Hacker folklore—”

— Charles Stross

I don’t hate him—he’s just a bore but that isn’t a capital offense. Usually.

— Charles Stross

My impressions are of a huge stainless steel kitchen and Australian expat waiters on rollerblades beaming infrared orders and wide-eyed smiles at each other from handheld computers as they skate around the refectory tables, where earnest young things in tiny rectangular spectacles discuss Derrida’s influence on alcopop marketing via the next big dot-sad IPO, or whatever it is the “in” herd is obsessing about these days over their gyoza and organic buckwheat ramen.

— Charles Stross

I hate it when people let their professionalism get in the way of real life.

— Charles Stross

Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait till he’s finished annoying you?

— Charles Stross

“Thank you for that reminder, Jimmy,” says Alan. “Any more compelling insights into why the laws of physics are not our friends?”

— Charles Stross

Didn’t they know that the only unhackable computer is one that’s running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off?

— Charles Stross

I’m beyond introspective self-loathing by now—you lose it fast in this line of work.

— Charles Stross

Bet you he’s a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers—and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it’s to defend his position.

— Charles Stross

Some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.

— Charles Stross

I’m only twenty-eight: I’m too young to die and too old to drive fast.

— Charles Stross

I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy-just-expired kind of way.

— Charles Stross

“They’ve sicced a demon on me.”“Yeah, well, He isn’t answering the phone.”

— Charles Stross

Not only is the past another country, it’s one that doesn’t issue visas.

— Charles Stross

I’m still wearing my shoes, I realize. And I’m still wearing this fucking suit. I didn’t even take it off for the flight—I must be turning into a manager or something. I have a sudden urge to wash compulsively. At least the tie’s snaked off to wherever the horrid things live when they’re not throttling their victims.

— Charles Stross

In this line of work, too much paranoia can be worse than too little.

— Charles Stross

They’re nuts. Completely insane! I don’t get this gambling thing. Didn’t these people study statistics at university? Evidently not...

— Charles Stross

My stomach flip-flops. No electronics? That’s heavy. In fact it’s more than heavy: to compute is to be, and all that. I don’t mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It’s like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.

— Charles Stross

Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off.

— Charles Stross

Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He’s not ashamed of boasting about it—he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry.

— Charles Stross

He gestures at a skeletal contraption of chromed steel and thin, black leather that only Le Corbusier could have mistaken for a chair: “Have a seat.”

— Charles Stross

He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince. But instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there’s much difference.)

— Charles Stross

I stare longingly at the bare chunk of space on the desktop. There may be a keyboard stitched into the lining of my cummerbund, but without a machine to plug it into it’s about as much use as a chocolate hacksaw.

— Charles Stross

“It’s top of the range.” She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it’s still there: “This baby’s got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence™ middle-ware cluster‡ connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe.”

— Charles Stross

The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.

— Charles Stross

“Watch out for any signs—anything, however small—that suggests Billington isn’t in the driving seat, if you follow my drift. Got that?”“I didn’t say that.” Alan shakes his head. “Once you start asking which captains of industry are being controlled by alien soul-sucking monsters from another dimension, why, anything might happen.”

— Charles Stross

It’s a classic case of misplaced accounting priorities, valuing depreciable capital assets a thousand times more highly than the fruits of actual labor—but that’s the nature of the government organization.

— Charles Stross

“Why are you trying to shoot that cat?”“It was possessed by the animation nexus behind JENNIFER MORGUE Two!” I gabble. “The clue—he saw a laser dot and dodged—”

— Charles Stross

I head off to the conference room for the Ways and Means Committee meeting—to investigate new ways of being mean, as Bridget (may Nyarlathotep rest her soul) once it explained it to me.

— Charles Stross

The literary James Bond is a creation of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic.

— Charles Stross

Beauty may be skin-deep, but horror goes all the way down to the desiccated bone beneath.

— Charles Stross

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.

— 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.

— Charles Stross

People tend to underestimate him on first acquaintance. It’s a mistake they only make once. Whether or not they survive.

— Charles Stross

“Here, take this. How about a toast? Confusion to the enemy!”He shrugs: “IT, Human Resources, the grim march of time—whoever you want, really.”

— Charles Stross

She’s half-past overdrawn at the bank of life.

— Charles Stross

Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive.

— Charles Stross

The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you.

— Charles Stross

But who cares?That is, indeed, the big-ticket question.

— Charles Stross

Let’s just say that you can’t always trust the historical record and move swiftly on.

— Charles Stross

On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me.

— Charles Stross

It’s like a steam locomotive or a stone axe: just because it’s obsolete doesn’t make it any less of an achievement, or any less fit for purpose.

— Charles Stross

If there’s one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it’s that they don’t have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned.

— Charles Stross

Once is happenstance but twice is enemy action, and thrice is a fuck-up.

— Charles Stross

Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising.This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”—a professional, in other words—and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence.

— Charles Stross

I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements.

— Charles Stross

Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.

— Charles Stross

Time is the one thing money can’t buy.

— Charles Stross

What price an immortal soul, when booty beckons?

— Charles Stross

Ninety-eight percent of management work in this organization is routine. The other two percent is a tightrope walk over an erupting volcano without a safety net. Congratulations: here’s your balance pole.

— Charles Stross

Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.

— Charles Stross

“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.” He sips his wine thoughtfully. “But the first kind don’t put it that way. They usually think in terms of the saved and the damned, with themselves sitting pretty in the lifeboat.” He manages to simultaneously look pained and resigned. “Sometimes they find their way out of the maze. But not very often.”

— Charles Stross

We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.

— Charles Stross

“What about religion?”“Religion is power, to these people. And power is religion, of course. If you’re a humble believer set on doing your deity’s will, then what are you doing spending the take on Lamborghinis and single malt? The real believers are running soup kitchens and emptying bedpans, trying to do good while the televangelists preaching the prosperity gospel are doing it to keep up the payments on the McMansion and the Roller.”

— Charles Stross

“What if he is a true believer, have you thought about that?”“A true believer in what? The prosperity gospel? New Republican Jesus who rewards his faithful flock for their faith with the ability to make money fast? That’s self-serving cant, and you know it. Wish-fulfillment as religion.” A twitch of the cheek: Persephone unamused. “Don’t get me started on the gap between the Vatican and their flock.”

— Charles Stross

Pay no attention to the gill slits and fins, they’re signs of grace. It’s come to a pretty pass when the bastard spawn of the Deep Ones turn into Presbyterian fundamentalists, hasn’t it?

— Charles Stross

“There’s a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. But even though their eschatology is insane, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re trying to summon up the elder gods.”

— Charles Stross

Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by jet lag.

— Charles Stross

I’m stranded in limbo, otherwise known as downtown Denver.

— Charles Stross

There is good management and bad management: good management is like air—you don’t know it’s there until it’s gone away.

— Charles Stross

Sometimes people do good things for bad reasons, and sometimes people do bad things for good reasons. He isn’t sure which this is yet, but he’s hoping for the former.

— Charles Stross

I’m thinking on the fly, here. (Although now that I’m in middle management I think I’m supposed to call it “refactoring the strategic value proposition in real time with agile implementation,” or, if I’m being honest, “making it up as I go along.”)

— Charles Stross

We’re up the highway from Colorado Springs. The holy rollers are big in Colorado. Mostly they’re harmless, ’long as you’re not a young woman in search of an abortion.

— Charles Stross

“Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label.”“But they’re Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it’s Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?”

— Charles Stross

“I was hoping you might be able to help me with a question of character.”“Of course not.” Lockhart is dismissive. “It’s a subjective value judgment and those don’t sit comfortably with ticky-boxes and objective performance metrics.”

— Charles Stross

A man so wrapped in secrecy that his shadow doesn’t have a high enough security clearance to stick to his heels.

— Charles Stross

They’re believers, Mr. Howard. Pentecostalist dispensationalists—they are saved, but they are surrounded by the unsaved, and they think their master is returning imminently, and anyone who isn’t saved by the time of his arrival is doomed. So they intend to save everyone whether or not they want to be saved, one brain parasite at a time.

— Charles Stross

I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad.

— Charles Stross

They’re outside the Nicene Creed and they’re not actually Christians, although they think they are—like the Mormons. But while the Book of Mormon is just a nineteenth-century fabrication there’s stuff in here that’s, uh, disturbing. Very disturbing, Bob.

— Charles Stross

I do something I never do in hotel rooms, which is to pick up the TV remote for a purpose other than hammering the “off” button.

— Charles Stross

I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience.

— Charles Stross

“Well…thanks. But I don’t like to make assumptions.”“Well that’s too bad, because you’re running on false ones.”

— Charles Stross

The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue.

— Charles Stross

Another problem with godheads, Johnny reflects, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology.

— Charles Stross

Me, I’m here because I can’t get out, and while I’m locked in the asylum I might as well take notes on the inmates.

— Charles Stross

I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there.

— Charles Stross

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.

— Charles Stross

One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information.

— Charles Stross

Pete is clearly mildly perturbed by this, as so he should be: his faith doesn’t have much room for sanguinary magic, unless you count holy communion.

— Charles Stross

Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.

— Charles Stross

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

— Charles Stross

Superficial appearances are misleading precisely because, so much of the time, they’re accurate.

— Charles Stross

I promise not to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation; it’s called civilization, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted.

— Charles Stross

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.

— Charles Stross

“But has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?”“I can think of several.” I cross my legs. “Mostly ranging from the inane to the criminally irresponsible.”

— Charles Stross

Having a policy based on works of fiction is worse than having no policy at all.

— Charles Stross

Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity.

— Charles Stross

(A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.)))

— Charles Stross

The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage...

— Charles Stross

Despair, dismay, disorientation, and delusion: the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse are coming my way.

— Charles Stross

If pauses can be pregnant, this one’s on the run from a fertility clinic.

— Charles Stross

It’s amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle.

— Charles Stross

Unfortunately his IQ seems to be off the scale, in the wrong direction.

— Charles Stross