Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Human
Beings
Humans
Interested
First
Reader
Hard
Fiction
Writing
Impossible
Write
Keep
Protagonists
Firsts
Foremost

More quotes by Charles Stross

Image
I do not click on random youtube videos.
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.
Charles Stross
Image
Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
--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
Image
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
Image
The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the piracy problem is massively over-rated.
Charles Stross
Image
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Charles Stross
Image
The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is doormat.
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Charles Stross
Image
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
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