Quotes from Charles Stross

Give me a bottle of Mountain Dew, an MP3 player hammering out something by VNV Nation, and a crate of Pringles: that's like being at home. Give me root access on a hostile necromancer's server farm, and I am at home.

Imagine, Sir David, the end of all you ever wanted brought about because an idiot banker did not prioritize highly enough a simple request from their master . . .

There's a fire on the hillside just above Skyland and it's like to go wild if we

experience has taught me that it is best never knowingly to underestimate the lethality of a sufficiently determined butler.

The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious.

There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system -- which they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil ...

About 80 percent of the NSA's total body count are actually employees of various consultancy firms, because that way they don't show up on the org chart. Their remaining internal managers can point to the black boxes that do the job and sneer, "Employees? We don't have no steenking employees!" (Tell that to Edward Snowden.)

Possibly that's what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence.

All life is based on the destruction of other life, even on tremendous scales of space and time... Our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and venerated the animals they had to kill.

Startled, she reached into the bag again. Another fortune cookie, another message: I MADE A BANDAGE BUT YOU EATED IT.

I'm not a morning person, I just do my best worrying when I should be asleep.

Our new allies are weak and unreliable and mean us ill. We need a new kind of arsenal if we are to defend democracy and freedom, and the first step in rebuilding our defenses is to build a hypercomputing cloud in solar orbit, one powerful enough to summon the Lord of Sleep to lead us…

because there's something joyless and deadening in the air, as if what this room really holds is the decaying miscarried fetus of the human future. Anyone who lingers here will sicken and die, just as if they were stranded in the pyramid on a dead world where once the photo-reconnaissance Concordes flew.

zimboe—a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it.

But his former day job—he is still a vicar, and his bishop is remarkably reluctant to raise a fuss about his apparent conscription by a secret government agency devoted to issues which can best be described as ungodly (or worse, wrong godly)—taught him a lot about helping people.

CHAPTER 15: RAIN OF STEEL CHAPTER 16: SCHWERPUNKT PART 4: BLOOD OATHS CHAPTER 17: STATE OF SIEGE CHAPTER 18: SCORPION STARE CHAPTER 19: ASYLUM Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason. —John Harington (16th century)

The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome—plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority. —Lord Acton

Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads.

Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war—especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE END OF the world. You might have noticed that Mo and I have no children. We don't even have a pet cat, the consolation prize of the overworked urban middle classes. There's a reason for this. Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?

Frankly, it had come as no surprise whatsoever to Eve to learn that her employer was an ecclesiast in the Cult of the Mute Poet—an esoteric religious order that, because of the sanguinary nature of its devotions, had a pronounced tendency towards secrecy.

If an ancient horror invites you into its limousine at gunpoint—

To a many-angled one, we impoverished entities who are stranded in three-plus-one dimensions are fairly harmless; nevertheless, even the inhabitants of flatland can inflict a nasty paper cut upon the unwary on occasion.