Engineering Infinity Quotes

“The final vanity. This whole episode has never been about us. Can't you see? If this is happening now, it must have happened over and over. Who knows how many other planets we lost in the past, consumed as weapons of forgotten wars? Maybe all we see, the planets and stars and galaxies, is just the debris of huge wars - on and on, up to scales we can barely imagine. And we're just weeds growing in the rubble. Tell that to the Prime Minister. And I thought we might ask them about their gods! What a fool I've been - the questions on which I've wasted my life, and here are my answers - what a fool." She was growing agitated. "Take it easy, Edith -”
― Charles Stross, Engineering Infinity

“Maybe solitude is the key to it all. A galactic isolation imposed by the vast gulfs between the stars, the lightspeed limit. As a species develops you might have a brief phase of individuality, of innovation and technological achievement. But then, when the universe gives you nothing back, you turn in on yourself, and slide into the milky embrace of eusociality - the hive. "But what then? How would it be for a mass mind to emerge, alone? Maybe that's why the Incoming went to war. Because they were outraged to discover, by some chance, they weren't alone in the universe.”
― Charles Stross, Engineering Infinity

“a man cannot make himself believe a lie just because it profits him. Men”
― Charles Stross, Engineering Infinity

“Stories come to an end. Eventually and always, there is a last chapter, a final scene. As you said, fictions get too big and cumbersome, and then the author gives them a mercy killing. But real life goes on and on. And that’s how you know that all of this is genuine.”
― Jonathan Strahan, Engineering Infinity

“There are races that do not enslave, do not slay, do not war. There are races which do not lie or falsify. You think them weak? But they are among the strongest and finest denizens of the Will. They waste no treasure, nor time, nor grief, nor lives, nor blood, to maintain the ungainly apparatus of suspicion and bloodshed you call government, the princes and policemen and hangmen without which you humans dare not risk to live with each other. Weak? So would savages, whose every cottage was a fortress and every door a barricade, think your race.”
― Charles Stross, Engineering Infinity

“When humans gather, crime is certain.”
― Charles Stross, Engineering Infinity

“All life is based on the destruction of other life, even on tremendous scales of space and time... Our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and venerated the animals they had to kill.”
― Charles Stross, Engineering Infinity