Quotes from Charles Stross

The widespread belief among some politicians that government can't do anything right—that the private sector is always better—becomes a corrosive, self-fulfilling prophecy. Government isn't allowed to be bright and cheerful, helpful and efficient.

Bogons?" "Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again.

I'm really sorry, sir, I was working on a final solution to the packing density problem in the sub-subbasement—" she glanced sideways at the dog-eared paperback lying facedown on her desk, copiously annotated: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach—"and I may have become slightly distracted.

Was failure to make tenure track justification for an honor killing?

MONDAY DAWNS BRIGHT AND HOT AND EARLY, AND I FIND MY SELF waking to the happy knowledge that I can go back to work, and nobody will order me home.

It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast—a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that's more real than we are?

But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient—I mean, they're, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the great pioneers of the spy thriller.

Peter and Wendy was in perpetual copyright—a copyright granted by Act of Parliament to Great Ormond Street Hospital

Nope." Imp sounded ever so slightly smug. "Wendy already tipped Big Sis off and she's on her way there right now. I mean, she's stopping here first to pick us up, but she's already on her way to kick butts and eat nuts." "You did not just try to distract me with a Squirrel Girl reference!" Game Boy's tone was accusatory.

Or was it running the world's weirdest Turing-complete variant Dungeons & Dragons campaign using a rule set isomorphic with first-order transdimensional summoning algebra—

Which meant gait metrics were unavailable, and facial recognition was notoriously bad at handling skin tones darker than a typical whitebread silicon valley bro. (It went all the way back to the color cards used to optimize photographic film stock for white-skinned targets in the 1950s: algorithms embodied the prejudices and biases of their designers.)

you can't learn from a fatal mistake.

Some are dealing with the injured chargers: it's a tense and bloody business, for damaged equoids don't simply scream piteously and wait to die like horses.)

management, bless their little cotton socks, decided that we needed to be Creative and Innovative and endowed with Silicon Valley start-up style va-va-voom.

Everything is terrorism these days: downloading, uploading, jaywalking with intent to cause fear.

They contained enchanted sigils, providing limited protection against extradimensional brain eaters, zombies, and targeted social media ads.

over the course of a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long time—possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament—a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors.

you've got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives.

the strongest manacles are born in the blood.

now my blood ran cold. Because if there's one thing worse than an IT manager who's feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it's an IT manager who's getting creative.

This is a joke. Right?" I'm pointing at the green-screen terminal on the desk, and the huge dial-infested rotary phone beside it. "No sir." Bill clears his throat. "Unfortunately the NDO's office budget was misfiled years ago and nobody knows the correct code to requisition new supplies. At least it's warm in winter: you're right on top of the classified document incinerator room, and it's got the only chimney in the building.

All large organizations are either superorganisms whose cells are human bodies, or very slow artificial intelligences that use human beings as gears in the Babbage engines that run their code.

my middle names aren't Oliver and Francis.