Charles Stross
You'll still get guys with an array of badges to demonstrate their importance, but that just excludes people. I think fandom is more inclusive now.Collection: Thinking
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).Collection: Believe
Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.Collection: Mistake
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Smart
More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market.Collection: Symptoms
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.Collection: Lawyer
Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.Collection: Years
--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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Reading
One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.Collection: Religious
Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night.Collection: Thinking
We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.Collection: Skills
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.Collection: Exercise
I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .Collection: Two
A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Mind
No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.Collection: Book
Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.Collection: Smart
I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.Collection: Fun
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.Collection: Ocean
Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.Collection: Motivation
The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.Collection: Chips
Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.Collection: Fighting
If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Wearing Black
I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)Collection: Football
Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.Collection: Goth
The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Atheist
Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.Collection: Book
Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.Collection: Writing
I do not click on random youtube videos.Collection: Video
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.Collection: Running
The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.Collection: Land
The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Running
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 ...)Collection: Writing
Starships are all work and no fun.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Dark
If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.Collection: Writing
I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.Collection: Self
I don't do flash fiction.Collection: Fiction
I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).Collection: Space
What I've learned during my life is that the near future is 90% identical to the present - if you buy a new car today, it'll probably still be on the road in 2022.Collection: Car
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.Collection: Thinking
When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Jobs