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

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Bottomless
Oceans
Surrounded
Islands
Ocean
Night
Men
Unthinking

More quotes by 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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You'll still get guys with an array of badges to demonstrate their importance, but that just excludes people. I think fandom is more inclusive now.
Charles Stross
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Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?
Charles Stross
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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
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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'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.
Charles Stross
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People want to buy mp3s but can't? Piracy ensues. Then Apple strong-arms the music studios into the iTunes store and music piracy drops somewhat. The same, I believe, is also happening with ebooks.
Charles Stross
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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
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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.
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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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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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.
Charles Stross
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The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the piracy problem is massively over-rated.
Charles Stross
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Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.
Charles Stross
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Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.
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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I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.
Charles Stross
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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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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'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