Quotes from Charles Stross

To find yourself trapped in a body with the wrong gender must be hard to bear: How much harsher to discover, at age thirty, that you're the wrong species?

I had a polite disagreement with Chief Inspector Grabby Hands." Chief Inspector Barrett. "It was him or me, and he had rank. Do you need me to draw you a diagram?" "No, that won't be necessary." Gibson nodded to himself, as if confirming a suspicion. He seemed indecently satisfied, but she was damned if she could see why.

I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes.

The only question," Eve mused aloud, "is whether time travel via the dream roads is call by value or call by reference.

They've pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?

pocket universe. All I have to do is pick up the Hand and walk back to the slowly evaporating gate before it closes . . . A minute passes. Then I put down the Hand of Glory

I picked you for this task, Colonel, precisely because you won't do it lightly.

Computers aren't as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)

Even the furniture in the glass room was transparent—off-the-shelf Louis Ghost chairs and a matching transparent table.

Mug of Joe," grunts Johnny. "Mocha venti with an extra shot for me, no cream," I add. "Anything else?" I shake my head and she wanders off. Johnny looks suspicious. "Since when do you speak Starbucks?" I shrug. "It's not as if I can help it; they've got our office surrounded, and they don't like it if you try to order in English." We wait

I'm lurking in the shubbery behind an industrial unit, armed with a clipboard, a pager, and a pair of bulbous night-vision goggles that drench the scenery in ghastly emeralt tones. The bloody thing make me look like a train-spotter with a gas-mask fetish, and wearing them is giving me a headache

After a few seconds to savor his self-derailment, Derek gets back on course.

One moment you're cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you're in a screaming death-spiral with flames pouring from the hole where the starboard engine was meant to be before some toe-cheese puked a missile up its exhaust. It takes a little time to switch mode from business-as-usual to six-alarms-emergency if you're not primed to expect it

A pair of vampires with clipboards walk into the back of a church in time for evening mass.

We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router endpoint, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal.

The knife-shaped thing sticking out of his throat is drinking greedily; one glance tells Johnny that the cop's beyond help. There's always a cost for using such occult weapons, and Johnny will pay it later, of that he is sure; but for now he's simply relieved to still be alive.

Rita stopped, suddenly acutely aware that while curiosity was her job, too much curiosity was reputedly felicidal:

Los idiotas emiten bogones que hacen que las máquinas se estropeen en su presencia. Los administradores de sistema absorben los bogones, lo que permite que las máquinas vuelvan a funcionar.

We remain convinced that this is the best defence posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

since the draw-down in forces triggered by the 2010 defense review, the units the Laundry can draw upon have been depleted. There are now just two SAS squadrons, 120 men in total, to cover all contingencies: and only half of them are available at any given time. If the shit really hits the fan they can draw on the regular Army and the Air Force for support, but there will be delays in getting everyone up to speed.

Ten minutes later two SUVs full of reluctant churchgoers rolled away from the front of Imp's family manse.

The IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It's a lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don't get out much, and when you do it's usually at night.

Real physical perfection isn't something a guy like me gets to see up close and personal very often, and it's something to marvel at - then run away from, before it hypnotizes you like a snake staring into the eyes of something small, furry, and edible.

Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship, which is to say one that it would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably scandalous a century before that.