Quotes from Charles Stross

History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.

I am a lazy, cynical, middle-aged guy who has long since come to the conclusion that most historical periods really sucked, for most people, most of the time.

One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were.

The real challenge in this line of work is being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to decide which you're going to spend the next six to nine months turning into something that people will pay for.

I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.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.

I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.

My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.

Pubs are, disturbingly, where I hatch most of my best idea-sculptures: possibly it's something to do with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, or maybe it's just having company to yack at.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

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.

What I've learned during my life is that the near future is 90% identical to the present - if you buy a new car today, it'll probably still be on the road in 2022.

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.

The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

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.

The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.

Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America.

Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.