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

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Civilization
Religious
Veneration
Place
Symbol
Children
Execution
Tool
Symbols
Main
Tools

More quotes by Charles Stross

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I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).
Charles Stross
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Humans are just barely intelligent tool users Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
Charles Stross
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No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants others are planned in minute detail.
Charles Stross
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--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.
Charles Stross
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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.
Charles Stross
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A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.
Charles Stross
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My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.
Charles Stross
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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.
Charles Stross
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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.)
Charles Stross
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My favourite movie is: Dr Strangelove. (I haven't seen any films released in the past 2-5 years, I'm afraid: I don't do TV/cinema).
Charles Stross
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While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
Charles Stross
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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).
Charles Stross
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Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.
Charles Stross
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The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is doormat.
Charles Stross
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Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
Charles Stross
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I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.
Charles Stross
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I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.
Charles Stross
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I've reached an age at which I'd rather pay more for something that just works than roll up my sleeves, reach for a spanner, and make it work. Time is money, and the older we get the less of it we've got left.
Charles Stross
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I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist.
Charles Stross
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I suspect losing paper maps but gaining GPS and online maps is a similar step function: maps still exist, but they're vastly more useful, not to say permanently up to date, in their new form. Again, I won't be shedding any tears, but I'll keep a paper road atlas in the back of my car for another few years, I think, Just In Case.
Charles Stross