"See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes."
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy. Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera.
"“Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label.” “But they’re Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it’s Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?”"
Charles Stross"The first time Wednesday saw a flag she had to look away, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Patriotism had never been a huge Muscovite virtue, and to see the way the fat woman in the red pants held on to her flag as if it were a life preserver made Wednesday want to slap her and yell Grow up! It’s all over! Except it also felt like...like watching Jerm, aged three, playing with the pewter pot containing Grandpa’s ashes. Abuse of the dead, an infection of history."
Charles Stross"I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there."
Charles Stross"One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information."
Charles Stross"Pete is clearly mildly perturbed by this, as so he should be: his faith doesn’t have much room for sanguinary magic, unless you count holy communion."
Charles Stross"Venous blood isn’t really blue. In lipstick terms it’s dark plum, not crimson gloss."
Charles Stross"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"