Quotes from Charles Stross

There are all sorts of other things, investigations into silent movies and TV serials (I pulled the file on "Quatermass" for shits and giggles—strictly speaking not germane to the project in hand, but I'd hit burn-out by that point and badly needed some relief reading that wasn't the eleventh Harry Dresden novel).

Stuff that really will improve my survival prospects when the tentacles hit the pentacle.

I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth—trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are—and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along.

I know just how devoted to this organisation you are. Draftees back in my day used to understand what they'd got themselves into, but you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?' I raise an eyebrow at him. He

The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.

And then the Internet happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and greedily indexing your every spoken word on duty.

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

Very good, Mr. Howard. They were the ones who didn't try to second-guess their commanding officer. Can I suggest that in future you take a leaf from their book and refrain from poking your nose into things you have been told do not concern you? Or at least learn not to be so predictable about it." "Ah—" "Go away before I mock you," he says, sounding distantly amused. I

It's almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress Ã¢â'¬Â¦ or perhaps it's over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares. I

It's absolutely true that Lovecraft knew stuff. Somewhere in grandpa's library he got his hands on the confused rambling inner doctrines of a dozen cults and secret societies. Most of these secrets were arrant nonsense on stilts—admixed with just enough knowledge to be deadly dangerous.

I'm afraid we shall find evidence of treason: if not, look harder.

They're vermin, Bob. They've been driven inland by over-fishing and now they're spreading disease, attacking waste collections, keeping people awake in the small hours, and carrying away stray cats and small dogs. Next thing you know they'll be cloning credit cards and planning bank robberies." "Yes, but…" I see no point in arguing; it's not as if I like seagulls.

I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on. The

To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind. She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant.

Ungern Sternberg died in September 1921, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad after Trotsky's soldiers captured him. Choudhury taps his folio again, looking severe: He was a very bad man, you know! He had a habit of burning paperwork.

his arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it's a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement.

when I saw that blasted license manager trying to dial out to the public internet to complain about Facilities running too many copies of the TLA monitoring client, I cc'd everyone I could think of on the memo—

outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp

Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don't need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction.

I wince at his casual disrespect as I follow Captain Perceval into the rear.

As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you're a child.

Only then will her father's geas allow her to turn her ingenuity to more urgent priorities—such as saving herself from her stepmother's murderous attention, partying with cute boy, and performing in Dracula at Whitby.

A certain Herr Schurz, a Prussian politician, once said: 'My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

It's lovely, like the moment of stunned disbelief immediately after you finally snap and tell the world's most annoying office-mate to shut the fuck up—the moment of silence when they have no comeback and you finally had the last word.