Charles Stross quotes - page 10
I imagine looking after a sixteen-year-old must be a bit of a headache.
”"Oh, it's mostly about building trust. She's still in the ugh, parents, uncool stage, but she's self-aware enough to know that it's just something she's going through. So I'm trying to give her enough space that she doesn't feel the need to burn bridges she might want to maintain later. The best thing you can do is provide them with a support framework rather than a cage. Don't try to micromanage and overprotect them, let them know they can come to you when they've got problems, and as long as they've got a reasonably level head, that's what they'll do.” He pauses. "And I try to keep a poker face whenever she introduces me to a boyfriend.
Charles Stross
You can do magic by hand, without computers, but magic performed by ritual without finite state automata in the loop-calculating machines, in other words-tends to be haphazard, unreliable, uncontrollable, prone to undesirable side effects, and difficult to repeat. It also tends to fuck with causality, the logical sequence of events, in a most alarming way.
We've unintentionally rewritten our history over the centuries, would-be sorcerers unwinding chaos and pinning down events with the dead hand of consistency-always tending towards a more stable ground state because chaos is unstable; entropy is magic's great enemy. When the ancients wrote of gods and demons, they might well have been recording their real-life experiences--or they may have drunk too much mushroom tea: we have no way of knowing.
Charles Stross
The HomeSec's focus group will take one look at this and tell you to sex it up.”...
"Why do you think that'll be a priority?” she asks.
"You know perfectly well why-...For the same reason they want a balanced team rather than a competent one. It doesn't fit the cultural agenda they're trying to impose.
Charles Stross
In Agent First's world, the ineluctable law of power is that you rule or you die.
To Agent First, the puppet show of democracy that Cassie believes in is obviously a child's tissue of attractive lies, set before the cattle to enable the secret rulers to dominate them without fear of uprisings.
Charles Stross
GP services (and other companies) have been lobbying Congress to privatize the US Postal Service for years now. There are any number of beneficiaries: the private parcel carrier services, the phone and cable networks and internet service providers, and the obvious corporate interests who can do without the nonprofit competition. And there are any number of politicians who can make political hay by being seen to cut government spending on a basic infrastructure service that doesn't turn a profit and that isn't able to defend itself politically. Nothing has officially happened yet – the inertia of the US government is astonishing – but it's obvious that the fix is in: too many people want the post office to die.
Charles Stross
"Yes-yes!” Jon bounces up and down on the balls of her feet.
"How much coffee did we have this morning?” Pete asks, suspicion dawning.
"All of it!”
Brains absorbs this fact slowly. The room he and Pete shared didn't come with a filter machine, but there was an industrial-sized one in the motel lobby. If Jon drank the entire jug-
"How many times did you refill it?” asks Pete.
"Only three times! It kept running out!”
Brains glances at the vicar. "Are we going to need a tranquilizer dart?” he murmurs.
Charles Stross
The Republic of Mhari contains five thousand times more cells than there are humans on earth, but is somehow both more and less than the sum of her parts. If all those cells die, then I am, by definition, dead. But the relationship between cell-citizens and the Republic of Me is less obvious than you might think.
At any point in time some of my cells are dying and being replaced, and the me that exist today consists almost entirely of different cells from the me of a couple of years ago-although I'm still me. But if you were to separate all my cells and then keep them alive in a mad scientist's test-tube collection, I'd be dead, though all my bits live on. The Republic of Self can be dissolved, or taken over in a coup, or drastically reformed. I harbor this illusion of unitary identity-but in reality I'm what biologists call a superorganism, a swarm, and ensemble entity. I am not me: I am Hobbes's Leviathan, or Leviathan's Representative.
Charles Stross
