Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Charles Stross
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Short
Styles
Style
Award
Story
Covers
Sampler
Stories
Contains
Scooped
Different
Collection
Novella
Trying
Collections
Locus
Awards
Hugo
Range
Wireless
More quotes by Charles Stross
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
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.)
Charles Stross
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
Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Charles Stross
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Charles Stross
Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
Charles Stross
I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.
Charles Stross
--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
My favourite movie is: Dr Strangelove. (I haven't seen any films released in the past 2-5 years, I'm afraid: I don't do TV/cinema).
Charles Stross
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
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
Charles Stross
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
The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
Charles Stross
I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.
Charles Stross
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
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
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
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Charles Stross
The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.
Charles Stross
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