Quotes from Charles Stross

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

The male ego is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's extremely brittle.

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...

I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

In memory of Terry Pratchett, who showed us all how it's done

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.

Let's see.' She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. 'You're in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.' I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly.

They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.

I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs

I have a low taste for urban fantasy and paranormal romance.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

Starships are all work and no fun.

Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.

It turns out that the killer application for virtual reality is other human beings. Build a world that people want to inhabit, and the inhabitants will come.

The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.