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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Make
Collectives
Would
Collective
Memory
Lose
Compliant
Memories
Amnesia
Loses
Dictators
Anything
Conceal
Without
Dictator

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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.
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Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?
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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.
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I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)
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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.
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The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.
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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.
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I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
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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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Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.
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While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
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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.)
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I do not click on random youtube videos.
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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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No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants others are planned in minute detail.
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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.
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All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
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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.
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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 reckon I can count on 30 more writing years, averaging a book a year (I can't keep up the 2-2.5 a year I used to do these days). And these days I've gotten round to wondering, for each new idea, do I want to be remembered for this? before I get to the point of spending a year on it.
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