Quotes from Charles Stross

Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?

We are, after all, homo economicus .

If he's serious about turning, I can probably walk him through the process using the tablet as a teaching tool: damn Alex for inventing such an easy-to-understand visualization. If you could broadcast it over a TV channel … my blood runs cold at the thought.)

He shrugs, an aw-shucks gesture quite at odds with the rest of his mannerisms, and produces a grin from wherever he keeps his spare faces when he isn't wearing them.

Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.

Jim can't tell if he was screaming from fear or yodeling in exhilaration.

Martian invasion: sure, the Army understands what it needs to do, if not necessarily how to go about it. Religious apocalypses involving the Four Horsemen: pass the holy water and bend over, here it comes again. But invasion by the armies of Middle Earth—who ordered that?

It's insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window.

That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.)

We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive.

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

Summer in England   THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar's tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman's skull, and so on.

Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook.

over-endowed with WOMBATs." (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.)))

IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one's own head—but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship.

As far as my fellow students go, I'm one of the two dangerous rebels who turned up in office casual; the rest are so desperately sober that if you could bottle them you could put the Betty Ford Clinic out of business.

Within the shielded darkness of the President's limousine a geas unlocks in my head, and I can finally remember the message the PM wants me to convey to his counterpart

America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern. —Woodrow Wilson, 1919

scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.

Who knows? It's a long shot, but it just might work.

This would be an extinction event for humanity. We can't let it happen. It is also a who-poisoned-my-beehives event for the Black Pharaoh, which is why He's trying to prevent it. (We bring Him honey: He keeps us around.)

demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it.

The vampire has just realized she's in a meeting populated exclusively by spooks and people who go bump in the night.

LOOK, DO YOU really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats?