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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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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
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More quotes by 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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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.
Charles Stross
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I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.
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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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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The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.
Charles Stross
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The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
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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Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.
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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While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
Charles Stross
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Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them librarians.
Charles Stross
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I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.
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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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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Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
Charles Stross
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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.
Charles Stross
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Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.
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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Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross