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Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Life
Singularity
Begets
Intelligence
Smart
Matter

More quotes by 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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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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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
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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.
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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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
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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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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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Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
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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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.)
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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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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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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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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What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.
Charles Stross
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Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
Charles Stross
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Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
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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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