Charles Stross

First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life__h, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.

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

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, __f my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.

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.

Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it__ semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty

Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.

The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.

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

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.)

I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.

The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.

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

One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were.

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.