Literary Birthday – 18 October – Charles Stross

Happy Birthday, Charles Stross, born 18 October 1964.

Charles Stross Quotes

If you’re going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write.
Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
I think that if there’s one key insight science can bring to fiction, it’s that fiction – the study of the human condition – needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn’t immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
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.
Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance – on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist’s response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
Generating ideas isn’t some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it’s a skill you can develop.

Charles Stross is an award-winning British writer. As a journalist, he has published work in computer and Role Playing Game magazines. As a novelist, his works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy. Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries in this genre include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan. He is the author of The Atrocity Archives.

Source for image:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2017-12-27_Charles_Stross_7627_small.jpg

Tobias KlenzeDeutsch: Weiterverwendung gemäß Lizenz mit dem folgenden Hinweis möglich: Bild: Wikipedia / Tobias Klenze / CC-BY-SA 4.0. Die Lizenz muss verlinkt werden!English: You may re-use this image under the terms of the license using the following reference: Image: Wikipedia / Tobias Klenze / CC-BY-SA 4.0. The license must be a link!, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Source for quotes

by Amanda Patterson