Charles Stross Quotes

Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced.

Governments are machines for producing and implementing legal frameworks.

I’m not a politician, even though I play-act one when the boss tells me to—I’m allowed to change my mind when my understanding of the facts changes.

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.

New Dresden is not a McWorld: it’s a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say “past masters” for a reason—they’re not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet (in one another’s backs).

Pay no attention to the gill slits and fins, they’re signs of grace. It’s come to a pretty pass when the bastard spawn of the Deep Ones turn into Presbyterian fundamentalists, hasn’t it?

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?)

There can be only one true religion. Are you feeling lucky, believer?
Like the majority of ordinary British citizens, I used to be a good old-fashioned atheist, secure in my conviction that folks who believed—in angels and demons, supernatural manifestations and demiurges, snake-fondling and babbling in tongues and the world being only a few thousand years old—were all superstitious idiots. It was a conviction encouraged by every crazy news item from the Middle East, every ludicrous White House prayer breakfast on the TV. But then I was recruited by the Laundry, and learned better.
I wish I could go back to the comforting certainties of atheism; it’s so much less unpleasant than the One True Religion.
The truth won’t make your Baby Jesus cry because, sad to say, there ain’t no such Son of God. Moses may have taken two tablets before breakfast, but there was nobody home to listen to the prayers of the victims of the Shoah. The guardians of the Kaaba have got the world’s best tourism racket running, the Dalai Lama isn’t anybody’s reincarnation, Zeus is out to lunch, and you really don’t want me to start on the neo-pagans.
However, there is a God out there—vast and ancient and infinitely powerful—and I know the name of this God. I know the path you have to walk down to be one with this God. I know his secret rituals and the correct form of prayer and his portents and signs. I have studied the ancient writings of his prophets and followers in person, not simply relying on the classified digests in the CODICIL BLACK SKULL files and the background briefings for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.
I’m a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos—in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever—was infinitely more comforting than the truth.
Because the truth is that my God is coming back.
When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun.
And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

The literary James Bond is a creation of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic.

You got overdraft at the mythology bank.

I’d call them dangerously loopy heretics who are well down the slippery slope to hell, Bob. A hell of their own creation, even if you don’t believe in the literal sulfur-and-brimstone variety presided over by a big red guy with horns and cloven hooves. Which these people very likely do, but they think they’re on the side of the angels, which makes them doubly bad.

Listen, there’s nothing corrupt about it. At least there’s nothing provably corrupt about the way outsourcing contracts are handled. That’s because corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?
All of this happens very discreetly. Air gaps, Chinese walls, and plausible deniability are baked into the process. But the general pattern is out in the open for those with eyes to see.
First, identify a department with an essential function or significant capital assets on the books. Second, define ambitious performance targets they can’t possibly meet with the resources available, hire a bunch of nonexec directors to “provide valuable insights from the private sector” to the board, and in case that’s not enough, cut the budget until they fail to perform. Third, the minister moves on and a new minister parachutes in, with lots of heroic rhetoric about radical change and accountability. Fourth, the nonexec directors leave, returning to their private sector posts with the large outsourcing company they originally came from, taking with them everything they’ve learned about how the agency is run. Fifthly and finally, the work is put out to public tender, and the usual outsourcing contractors, who now know how the agency works in intimate detail, make a – surprise! – winning bid. Finally, the usual suspects show up on the golf course a year or two later and buy trebles all around.
What greases the wheels is that the capital assets managed by the agency are transferred to the new owners, thus taking them off the government’s books, thereby thinning the property portfolio the Crown can borrow against. It looks good to get all that debt off the balance sheet. Meanwhile, tax revenue continues to roll in and some of it is now siphoned off to rent back the former government assets.
You might think, “That’s insanely inefficient!” and you would be right. But you’re not seeing it through the wonderful rose-tinted lenses of high finance. Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.

Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask why his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced.

The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.

Shopping is the true religion of Middle America, and this Walmart is the most eclectic of mega-churches, perpetually understaffed and a bit unkempt, with stock flowing off the shelves and piles of stripped packaging forming cardboard snow drifts in corners.