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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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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Books
Almost
Reading
Book
Duration
Writing
Genre
Completely
Novel
Stop

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Can I remember I remember lots, I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.
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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.
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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
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[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
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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 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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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?
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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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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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Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.
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Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Charles Stross
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All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
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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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 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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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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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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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?
Charles Stross