Charles Stross Quotes
Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.
The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'
One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.
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.
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?
The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.
Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)
We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.
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.
What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.
I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.
In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.
I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.
I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.
Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.
I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)
I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.
Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.
I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.
I'm an individual. I do not want to get into a pissing match with an organization that is a de-facto gigadollar-turnover multinational!
I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.
For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles.
I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.
People want to buy mp3s but can't? Piracy ensues. Then Apple strong-arms the music studios into the iTunes store and music piracy drops somewhat. The same, I believe, is also happening with ebooks.
The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the "piracy" problem is massively over-rated.
Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Book depository is nothing new; there've been outlets selling books internationally via mail order for many decades - the only change is that it's now easier to find and use such services.
The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat".
I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).
