Quotes from Charles Stross

It seems people don't want to be awake these days. Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced

pivoted the results on our Criminal Records Bureau and National Insurance database mirrors to get the place of work for everyone who's on the books, and the pre-processor is turning that into grid reference data so we can plot them on a map or query for areas where the rate of that's funny . . .

Some invasions barely warrant the name.

Ah, the warm fuzzies of decisive action.

I'm possessed, recursively.

April 5th. You know what that means to me? That means the budget for the project expired at the end of financial year 1968 and was not renewed. (Yes, British government budgets—and the tax year—start on April 6th. Why are you looking at me like that? Don't your tax years start and stop on a random date in April?) I

Her father stood stiffly, as if his knees ached. Of a sudden Evie realized that he was, in fact, old: or at least middle-aged, which from a twenty-three-year-old perspective was the same thing. Hair thinning and graying to ashy silver, belly sagging over the waistband of the jeans he wore on his day off, a reminder that he'd met her mother after a rock concert in 1980.

Finally, they began to investigate the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson, Wright was convinced, was a KGB agent." I'm nodding along like a metronome at this point. "There was a group, a cabal if you like, of MI5 officers. About thirty of them. They actually planned a coup d'état in 1972. They

If they're smart enough to be useful they get ideas about making themselves indispensable—ideas about getting above their station, as you Brits would put it. If they're too dumb to be useful they're a drain on your management time. All corporations are an economy of attention, from the top down.

Personally I blame the Flynn effect—in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two

can't decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series

Mulle tundub, et astronoomide seas on mingi seltskond suisa solvunud, et need, kes selle ketta ehitasid ja meid siia tõid, ei maandunud Valge Maja ette murule ega tutvustanud ennast.

Autarchies had been shattered, hermit kingdoms destroyed. Almost a billion had died in war, plague, starvation, and madness. But worse was yet to come, as what passed for civilization on this world guttered and faded beneath the penumbra of a darkness deeper than eternal night.

Crawling eldritch horrors don't get planning permission unless they're Trump's hairpiece.)

Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media. —JOHN VON NEUMANN

The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms—translation: all your bank account are belong to us—and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time. This

I'm a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos—in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever—was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I'm keeping the last shell for myself.     A

In case you're worried about BLUE HADES, Professoe O'Brien speaks the language and is qualified to Liase. She's also completed her certification fixation on combat epistemology and can operate as your staff philosopher, should circumstances require it.

Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer.

If he wakes the ancient sleeping horrors I am going to have to brief the private secretary and the Joint Intelligence Oversight Committee so that they can explain CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN to the COBRA Committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, and I expect that will make them extremely unhappy

Secretary of State Henry Stimson disbanded the Black Chamber in 1929, with the immortal phrase, "gentlemen do not read each other's mail," but that didn't stop the Black Chamber's secrets

This is serious business: you're representing the Laundry in front of the Black Chamber and some very big defence contractors, old school tie and all that." "I went to North Harrow Comprehensive," I sat wearily, "they didn't trust us with neckties, not after the upper fifth tried to lynch Brian the Spod.

The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy.

Fucking netbooks; you can't even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)