Quotes from Charles Stross

This compares to a 202 base pair difference between us and Neanderthals

Our first priority is the same as it ever was," he said: "survival. Not all of us, or any of us in particular, or forever, but survival is the principal goal. It's the function of all life forms to persist for as long as possible. If nobody and nothing survives, nothing matters. And I don't know about you, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with that.

The competition could offer a free pass from the risk of having their heads added to the PM's decorative sculpture—or skullpture?—at Marble Arch. Whatever else you could say about His Dread Majesty, he didn't generally execute his servants unless they really fucked up.

and not getting to hang out at a theatrical troupe's after-party with Cassie. (Who he gloomily realizes he will never see again

An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis.

there's a point at which sufficient incompetence is malice.

The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy.

I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective.

Luckily, I'm not a stand-up comedian, so I don't get the fear of standing on stage in front of a dead audience: my humorous pieces have to make it past an editor before they get exposed to the public.

I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

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.

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...

Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them "librarians".

I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.