Frases de Charles Stross

„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, The Laundry Files

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files
Fonte: Overtime

„Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.“

—  Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives

Fonte: The Atrocity Archives

„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, Saturn's Children

Fonte: Saturn's Children

„Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.“

—  Charles Stross

Fonte: Toast, and Other Stories

„Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.“

—  Charles Stross

„Unfortunately it’s also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen—it’s invisible and you don’t notice its presence until it’s gone, and then you’re sorry.“

—  Charles Stross, livro The Fuller Memorandum

Fonte: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 2, “Pointing the Finger” (p. 32)

„“I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?
A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?”
Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes. Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.”“

—  Charles Stross, livro Singularity Sky

Fonte: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 143)

„Here we are, sixty something human minds. We’ve been migrated—while still awake—right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 184

„No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Rule 34

Fonte: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 1, “Liz: Red Pill, Blue Pill” (p. 16)

„Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents—God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke (the Eschaton didn’t count, having explicitly denied that it was a deity)—and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Iron Sunrise

Fonte: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 18, “Grateful Dead” (p. 294)

„Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead.“

—  Charles Stross, The Laundry Files

Overtime (2009)
The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014)

„Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years …“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), pp. 38-39

„She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn’t work that way.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), p. 72

„Annette’s communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he’s promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), pp. 57-58

„Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Singularity Sky

Fonte: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 9, “Diplomatic Behavior” (p. 198)

„Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 5 (“Router”), p. 201

„“You have an evil mind!”
“And this is a bad thing how, exactly?”“

—  Charles Stross, livro Halting State

Fonte: Halting State (2007), Chapter 28, “Jack: Sex Offender” (p. 235)

„“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.”“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), pp. 396-397

„Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Rule 34

Fonte: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 251)