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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
Stop
Books
Almost
Reading
Book
Duration
Writing
Genre
Completely
Novel

More quotes by 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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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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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 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
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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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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 told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.
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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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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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
Charles Stross
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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
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All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
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 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
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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 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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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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Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
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
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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