Quotes from Charles Stross

Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?)

I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.

Didn't they know that the only unhackable computer is one that's running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off? What did they think they were doing?

The empire of the Pharaohs was old before Rome was a twinkling in Odysseus's eye, wise before China had been discovered, and over and done with before our founding fathers came down from Mount Olympus to give us the Bible and the US Constitution—

Sociopath was one of the most useful concepts that Miriam's Memetic Engineering Task Force had imported from the United States: Erasmus's Propaganda Ministry had been working overtime to raise awareness of it as an Anti-Democratic Problem: People who think People are Things.

Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He's absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We're keeping him here because he's not deemed a hazard to himself, but so far he's confessed to assassinating Margaret Thatcher—

The morning after her date with her nerdishly cute prince of darkness, Cassie is scheduled for a lecture at nine o'clock. She blows it off because life's too short and anyway the world is going to end in about two weeks' time, when the Second Heavy Cavalry Brigade rumbles into town accompanied by skies that rain wyrmfire and the death spells of combat magi.

Nor can I tell him—lest the SA's command override cause my arterial blood vessels to burst and my eyeballs to catch fire—about Long-Term Continuity Operations and the Resistance.

I feel ill with emotional indigestion: I don't think I've ever felt for Mo the kind of raw, priapic lust I feel for Ramona, but Ramona is a poisonous bloom—off-limits if I value my life.

where it's not unusual for certain senior personnel to keep such a low profile that only the payroll computers in HR can remember their names.

friend of mine who was turned down

Because it's Glasgow, where the weather offers you a creative combination of hypothermia and sunburn simultaneously: and right now it's playing a DJ mix with six El Nino events, a monsoon, and a drought on the turntables.

Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes, his grandmother replies bleakly. Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life.

But I can't be in three places at once!" "Tough," says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. "You're management now; isn't it time you learned to delegate?

But what are we going to do with a load of guns?" asks Pete. "I don't know, Brains, what are we going to do with a half-track full of guns?" Pinky asks. Brains chuckles. "Same thing we do every night, Pinky—" "Fort up and wait for reinforcements," Pinky says flatly.

It has so much character that it's probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.

because you know all the statistics, nearly 45 per cent of gamers are women, even though if you look at the biz from outside it seems to be focussed on an attention-deficient twelve-year-old male with a breast fixation and a sugar high.

Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky—it

Clegg, Miliband, Farage resigning (rumours that they are to be the new Top Gear line-up cannot be confirmed at this time).

This is the second time you've been arrested in your entire life, and your stress levels are so high that were a bunch of black-robed inquisitors to file chanting into your cell and lead you down a stony tunnel lined with manacled skeletons to a cavern furnished with an electric chair, it would come as a relief.

the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows.

By the way, what is that you're working on?" "Software-configurable RAID grid." She pauses, a cable in each hand. "Go on, your ride will be waiting." "RAID grid being . . . ?" "Redundant Array of Interconnected Demons." She bares her teeth at him. "Demons!" he squeaks, and clutches his magic dice.

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent.

They'll like it even less if I hear any words from them," I said. You have to be firm with colonial troops: they have only as much backbone as their commanding officer.