Neptune's Brood Quotes

“I stared at him. “You’re a bat, Rudi! She’s a mermaid. What were you thinking?”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Pay attention: There will be an exam later.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“...there is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“A historian who works for a bank: That’s not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it?”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every insterstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Look.” I pointed. “Shin-Tethys as a whole maintains a positive trade surplus with the rest of the system. A third of the local nations don’t export directly, but there’s a lot of internal, intramural trade between the tribes—the main six exporters account for eighty-two percent of the uranium and fifty-seven percent of the rare earths. What comes in is, well, lots of skilled labor, finished high-tech assemblies, anything that needs microgravity or vacuum or very high temperatures or an anaerobic environment. In other words, it’s your typical pattern for an energy-exporting planet, with the added twist that because it’s very damp, a lot of planetary surface activities—smelting metals, manufacturing ceramics—are expensive to perform locally. The only interesting thing is how little slow money is going into their economic system. As for banking corruption, there’s the usual, but no more than the usual. Around one government per decade—out of nearly five hundred, mind—gets into bad trouble one way or another. But the system is self-stabilizing: What usually happens is that a consortium of their trading partners and main creditors get together and mount a hostile takeover—I believe they call it a “war”—and place the defaulter under administration until it digs itself out of the hole.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance. . . . Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit,” said the travel agent.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit,” said the travel agent. He was clearly trying hard to be helpful: “It’s not as if you’ll need them where you’re going, is it?” “Is it possible to find a better price by booking me on a different routing?” I asked. “I’m very attached to my limbs.” (Quaint and old-fashioned, that’s me.)”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“...butcher, baker, fusion-reactor maker.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Only debt is forever.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Starships are all work and no fun.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“... the ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walked around on their own legs. I have heard of some bizarre vocations in my life, but seldom anything quite so disgusting.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“We are, after all, homo economicus.”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood

“Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?”
― Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood