The Annihilation Score Quotes

“I wasn’t expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“(This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It’s no consolation that some time later someone will realize that an organization was needed to carry out the original organization’s task, so a replacement is created: you still lost your job and the task went undone. The only sure way forward is to build an agency that looks to its own survival before it looks to its mission statement. Just another example of evolution in action.)”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but the official Home Office superhero team is going to have to conform to public expectations of what a superhero team should look like, or it’s not really going to work terribly well. There’s room for one person of color, one female or LGBT, and one disability in a core team of four – if you push it beyond that ratio it’ll lose credibility with the crucial sixteen to twenty-four male target demographic, by deviating too far from their expectations. Remember, reasonable people who acquire superpowers are not our target. This is a propaganda operation aimed at the unreasonable ones: disturbed hero-worshiping nerd-bigots who, if they accidentally acquire superpowers, will go on a Macht Recht spree unless they’re held in check by firm guidance and a role model to channel them in less destructive directions.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“silly me, I wasn’t expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Superman, Iron Man, Batman”—Flyaway Hair winces visibly—“you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“We shouldn’t even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we’re management, not heroes.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Cocktail hour at the embassy consisted of lots of charming men and women in suits and LBDs drinking Buck’s Fizz and being friendly to one another, and so what if half of them had gill slits and dorsal fins under the tailoring, and the embassy smelled of seaweed because it was on an officially derelict oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, and the Other Side has the technical capability to exterminate every human being within two hundred kilometers of a coastline if they think we’ve violated the Benthic Treaty?”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“That looks nasty, I hope you’ve got a change of clothes back at the office. I guess now we know why real superheroes wear artificial fibers.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“It’s amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Sorry, I should have warned you.” Apologies are the keystone of an enduring relationship. Failing to apologize for mistakes, or getting onto a treadmill of belittling insults, is a bad warning sign. So far we’ve avoided it, but . ”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He’s absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We’re keeping him here because he’s not deemed a hazard to himself, but so far he’s confessed to assassinating Margaret Thatcher—”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Anyway, you don’t have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD,” Karim grumps. “You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way—”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Who knows? It’s a long shot, but it just might work.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Being management means having to hold your hands behind your back while your inexperienced junior staff crap all over a job you could have done in five seconds—and then taking their mess right on the chin.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“People.” I pause for a moment. “Remind me of Peel’s Principles of Policing, again?” Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. “Policing by consent,” I hint. “Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“saccade”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Women over a certain age become socially invisible: people just ignore us. I’m close enough to the tipping point that if I don’t take care of my appearance, I can fall foul of it. It’s a very strange experience, being the invisible middle-aged woman. You can walk into a shop or restaurant or a bar and eyeballs just seem to slide past you as if you aren’t there. When you’re trying to get served, it’s infuriating, sometimes to the point of being humiliating as well, but in our line of work . . .”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“People.” I pause for a moment. “Remind me of Peel’s Principles of Policing, again?” Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. “Policing by consent,” I hint. “Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?” “Since”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“Different cultures have different responses to paranormal phenomena. In sub-Saharan Africa we are tracking an upswing in reports of vigilante attacks on suspected witches. There may be some correlation with homophobic political rhetoric: moral panics frequently spread to adjacent targets by contagion. Certainly there has been an upswing in reports of koro from western Africa recently . . . In predominantly Islamic countries there have been increasing reports of Djinn and ifrit, and witchcraft trials have been reported in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s tribal territories, and Afghanistan. However, they can’t be ascribed directly to superpower manifestations: witchcraft accusations are often leveled at ordinary men and women as a pretext for settling grudges. There’ve also been outbreaks of miracles in Poland, Ireland, Mexico, and elsewhere in Central and South America. Statues of the Virgin crying tears of blood, that sort of thing. Religious manifestations in India, much speaking in tongues in Baptist churches in the Deep South. “Overall, the incidence of religious anomalies worldwide—reported miracles, curses, incidents of successful imprecatory prayer—is up by roughly 150 to 200 percent over the past three months.”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score

“To find yourself trapped in a body with the wrong gender must be hard to bear: How much harsher to discover, at age thirty, that you’re the wrong species?”
― Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score