Charles Stross: I'm an individual. I do not want to get into a pissing...

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

Charles Stross

networking novelists skills

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?

Charles Stross

wall war children

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)

Charles Stross

writing fiction firsts

A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?

Charles Stross

issues college religious

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

Charles Stross

naysayers please wells

You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I'd never have time to do anything else.

Charles Stross

needed mind knows

Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.

Charles Stross

had-enough fighting pay

I'm wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I'm told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.

Charles Stross

wearing-black obsessive-compulsive pockets

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

Charles Stross

who-cares writing ideas

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

Charles Stross

chips function

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

Charles Stross

novelty motivation joy

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Charles Stross

ocean men night

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

Charles Stross

amazon hats customers

Starships are all work and no fun.

Charles Stross

fun

I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.

Charles Stross

boots needs thinking

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

Charles Stross

singularity smart matter

For someone who is starting out on developing their critical skills, just being aware of its existence is great: it can make the difference between trying to write a story around a cliche or an original idea, and better still, studying it can eventually clue you in on how to breathe new life into tired tropes.

Charles Stross

tired skills writing

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night.

Charles Stross

gun night thinking

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Charles Stross

liberty might memories

I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

Charles Stross

crazy reflection fun

I'm an individual. I do not want to get into a pissing match with an organization that is a de-facto gigadollar-turnover multinational!