Charles Stross

“Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.”

“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 turns out that the killer application for virtual reality is other human beings. Build a world that people want to inhabit, and the inhabitants will come.”

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

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

“I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.”

“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.”