Quotes from Charles Stross

But otherwise it's darkness, darkness, as far as the eye can see.

Yet how did they know to preserve their dead for thousands of years without cryonic suspension? And how did they build their giant pyramids, made out of stone blocks bigger and heavier than shipping containers, quarried from mountains hundreds of miles from the Valley of the Kings?" Obviously, Mary noted, empires that endured for thousands of years couldn't possibly have achieved anything notable without the helpful guidance of interstellar white saviors—

When humans gather, crime is certain.

and go looking for a potted plant that appears hardy enough to survive being irrigated with the stuff.

concentrate on my deep breathing and the whole mindfulness shtick and on trying not to casually squeeze the contents of a taxiing aluminum tube of intercontinental goodness into my imaginary mouth—it's a Boeing 777 or Airbus A330 and it's nearly two miles away, a distantly rational part of me realizes—

but on the ridgeline up by Magic Meadows there's a place where the trees are all flattened outwards in a circle and there's a scorched symbol in the dirt, kinda like a five-pointed star with an eye in the middle, like the Brotherhood

the beasts that perish

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.

He looks like the bastard offspring of a multitool and a mangabot.

Some knowledge is inherently corrupting

the United States is structurally an imperial project, it's in our political DNA. We're always looking for a frontier to expand into, we can't back down, anyone who admits we're overmatched gets sidelined and booted out of office by an upstart who insists that we can never be defeated, only betrayed.

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

In the Laundry we supposedly pride ourselves on our procedures. We've got procedures for breaking and entering offices, procedures for reporting a shortage of paper clips, procedures for summoning demons from the vasty deeps, and procedures for writing procedures. We may actually be on track to be the world's first ISO-9000 total-quality-certified intelligence agency.

There's enough irony in my situation that a skilled blacksmith could turn it into a katana.

reach into my travel bag and pull out my hacked Palm computer

Very strong imagery of conformity versus mold-breaking, concealing conformity disguised as mold-breaking. Ever wondered why Mac users are so glassy-eyed about their boxes?

I can't get out of here soon enough, he thinks, and glances at his smartwatch—a birthday present from his wife—only to see that it has crashed and frozen on reboot, mocking him with an image of the apple from the tree of knowledge, one bite down.

People." I pause for a moment. "Remind me of Peel's Principles of Policing, again?" Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. "Policing by consent," I hint. "Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?" "Since

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?)

To any old punks who're reading this: yes, Chickentown is a shout-out to John Cooper Clark's memorable song, "Evidently Chickentown," a striking evocation of heroin withdrawal in small-town/suburban England in the 1970s and 1980s.

Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.

Time slips slowly away until Iris's coffee is a memory of bitterness dusted with cocoa

The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.

You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort.