Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circum... by Charles Stross

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

Charles Stross

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Categorized in : Human Condition Circumstances Study

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".

names book people

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

malfunction machinery idiot

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

powerpoint surface bullshit

I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)

violent grew-up football

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.

oxygen gone sorry

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

religious civilization children

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! by Charles Stross

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

genes pool police

I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible).

light believe needs

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.)

void mad errors

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.

atheist waiting believe

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time. by Charles Stross

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

available novel writing

I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.

british reform atheist

Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

technology rights running

Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remem... by Charles Stross

Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.

matter remember

The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.

real brain order

For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles.

style awards trying

The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy tr... by Charles Stross

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

trilogies fantasy land

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.

ethical-standards agony thinking

The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.

yellow people ideas

I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).

progress track character