there’s a worm of truth at the heart of every fictional apple

Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Stross The Atrocity Archives worm truth heart every fictional apple

Consider also:

  1. “Len Deighton was not an author of spy thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War–era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane characters play. And in contrast, H. P. Lovecraft was not an author of horror stories—or not entirely—for many of his preoccupations, from the obsessive collection of secret information to the infiltration and mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the obsessions of the thriller writer.”
  2. The Atrocity Archives
  3. “Hackers, in fiction, are the trickster-gods of the realm of computing. They go where they’re not supposed to, steal anything that isn’t nailed down (or rather, written down in ink on parchment with a quill plucked from a white goose), and boast about it.”
  4. “WE ARE NOT ALONE, THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, yadda yadda yadda.”
  5. “this ain’t that kind of movie, and I’m no Arnold Schwarzenegger.”