A Conventional Boy Quotes

“Camp Sunshine had never delivered on Pontins’s promise of sun, sand, and fun. Instead it rained sideways eight days a week, the local mice had evolved webbed toes and were working on gills, and such recreational necessities as paper and crayons were strictly rationed lest the inmates amuse themselves by sketching elder signs in their cell blocks after lights-out.”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy: A Laundry Files Novel

“Innocent people are being accused of lurid crimes once again, because the witch hunt offers its participant the most rewarding live-action role-playing experience of all—just suspend your disbelief and you, too, could be surrounded by a hellish conspiracy of Satanists and 5G chip-implanting vaccine shills who want to mind-control you and subjugate you to the will of the New World Order! (Whatever that is.)”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy

“you’re emulating some kind of minimal universal Turing machine using the chessboard. Say, a 2,5 UTM—two registers, five operations—you can encode the registers positionally in the chessboard’s two dimensions, and use the moves to simulate any other universal Turing machine, or a transform in an eleven-dimensional manifold like Axiom Refuge—”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy

“He beams at my bafflement, delighted to have found a new victim for his ancient puns.”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy

“In the name of, um, whoever am I a living emissary of? In the name of She-Ra, power up, dude.”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy

“He had dice for all the platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, teapotahedron (the latter a manifold that could exhibit symmetry in a non-Euclidean space with a sanity-warping fractional dimensionality).”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy

“(One particularly complex grid was headlined Replacement alignment system: she had a handle on character alignments by this point, and the new Bureaucratic/Ad-Hoc axis that replaced Lawful/Chaotic felt like a personal attack.)”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy

“Baffled, uncertain, but definitely happy,”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy

“There were no computers in Camp Sunshine, for computers were powerful thaumaturgic tools and giving computers to cultists was like giving assault rifles and sugary drinks to toddlers.”
― Charles Stross, A Conventional Boy