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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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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Around
Line
Devoid
Real
Lines
Incomprehensible
Thing
Brain
Brains
Something
Existence
Plot
World
Moral
Theme
Facts
Narrative
Largeness
Order
Draw
Wrestle
Reality
Draws
Narratives

More quotes by Charles Stross

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Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism at worst, it's being unoriginal.
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I do not click on random youtube videos.
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I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.
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The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is doormat.
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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.
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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).
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I don't want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.
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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.
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Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
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Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
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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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[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
Charles Stross
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I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's appropriate to for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.
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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.
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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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I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.
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.
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I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.
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I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.
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I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.
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