364 Quotes by Charles Stross

My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.

I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)

The paucity of near-future U.S. scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There's a trend in U.S. scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff.

Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

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.

Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America.

The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.

The social context of the UK is more open to the future, the old pessimism has been scrubbed and there's a view that you can engage with the future again. There is quite a lot of optimism in British science fiction, much less of the sackcloth and ashes and 'we're all going to die' attitude that it used to have, whereas the Americans have become more entrenched and fearful since 2001.