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)

„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

„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

„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

„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)

„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

„“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)

„Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse—an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling—so the tribe could work collectively—and then reflexively, to simulate the individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus—signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), p. 397

„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? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?)“

—  Charles Stross, livro Accelerando

Fonte: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 4 (“Halo”), pp. 146-147

„“Bad day at the office?”
“It’s always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.”“

—  Charles Stross, livro Glasshouse

Fonte: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 18, “Connections” (p. 302)

„Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?“

—  Charles Stross, livro Rule 34

Fonte: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)

„The first rule of space travel…is that mistakes are fatal. Space isn’t friendly; it kills you. And there are no second chances.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Singularity Sky

Fonte: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 4, “The Admiral’s Man” (p. 72; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

„And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Iron Sunrise

Fonte: Iron Sunrise (2004), Chapter 2, “Out of the Frying Pan” (p. 45)

„You got overdraft at the mythology bank.“

—  Charles Stross, livro Singularity Sky

Fonte: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 15, “Delivery Service” (p. 329)