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The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is doormat.

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Label
Polite
Labels
Towards
Trouble
Doormat
Applies

More quotes by 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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All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Charles Stross
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I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.
Charles Stross
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The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
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'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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[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
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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Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.
Charles Stross
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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
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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 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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I do not click on random youtube videos.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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