Quotes from Charles Stross

To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!" "It's

She made herself uncomfortable behind the desk, erecting her laptop before her like a GM's screen in a game of Cubicles and Corporations.

Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath.

Yippee. I haven't had this much fun since I was in the Transhuman Police, mixing it up with superpowered neo-Nazis, and by fun I mean fuck me I demand a pay rise and a nice quiet office job—

Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like "memory leak" and "debugger.

Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she's late? It doesn't normally take her this long to terminate an employee.

Waaant equity, hisses the alien intruder. You can't be Pamela Macx, says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. She's in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, didn't he? Claws go snicker-snack before his face. Investment partnership! screeches the harridan. Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast! It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard.

But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place.

And convincing someone that an outrageous ritual has caused them to forget the constitutional bedrock of their society is hard.

It's a bit like cricket," Pete agrees. "Weeks of endless boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of existential terror.

Better get accustomed to it, she told herself, mentally adding a note to her checklist: relearn how to human.

I've met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I've even survived the attention of the Auditors (when I was young, foolish, and didn't know any better). But I've never lost a classified file before, and I don't ever want there to be a first time. I force myself to sit down

I'm a child of the wired generation, unlike some of the suits hereabouts who have their secretaries print everything out and dictate their replies for an audio-typist to send.)

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint.

In our tongue we would say alfär.

As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor had a problem.

And if the common people ever realise that vampires exist, it will be a very short time indeed before naked noonday identity parades are required by law.

the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you're facing in your job involves napalm, if

We have chickens! And ostriches—they're like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur—that's like a really huge chicken, with teeth—but for architectural reasons we can't let it roam free just yet.

his beard is about thirty centimeters long, grizzled and salted and bifurcated. It has so much character that it's probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.

Oh, and if the Nazgûl aren't already on the alert for reports of vampires entering the country, I'm a chocolate teapot.

We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem." The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. "How can you love yourself if you can't love somebody else?