Glasshouse [Mass Market Paperback]

Charles Stross (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 26, 2007

In the twenty-seventh century, accelerated technology dictates the memories and personalities of people. With most of his own memories deleted, Robin enters The Glasshouse-an experimental polity where he finds himself at the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The censorship wars"during which the Curious Yellow virus devastated the network of wormhole gates connecting humanity across the cosmos"are finally over at the start of Hugo-winner Stross's brilliant new novel, set in the same far-future universe as 2005's Accelerando. Robin is one of millions who have had a mind wipe, to forget wartime memories that are too painful"or too dangerously inconvenient for someone else. To evade the enemies who don't think his mind wipe was enough, Robin volunteers to live in the experimental Glasshouse, a former prison for deranged war criminals that will recreate Earth's "dark ages" (c. 1950"2040). Entering the community as a female, Robin is initially appalled by life as a suburban housewife, then he realizes the other participants are all either retired spies or soldiers. Worse yet, fragments of old memories return"extremely dangerous in the Glasshouse, where the experimenters' intentions are as murky as Robin's grasp of his own identity. With nods to Kafka, James Tiptree and others, Stross's wry SF thriller satisfies on all levels, with memorable characters and enough brain-twisting extrapolation for five novels. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Hard on the heels of his acclaimed novel of mankind's evolving technological destiny, Accelerando (2005), Stross turns in another bravura performance with a fanciful glimpse at life in the twenty-seventh century. In an era of virtual immortality, where computer backups of human consciousness have become as routine as unlimited body modification, Robin is a patient in a rehab clinic for convalescents of voluntary memory erasure. With only scant clues, contained in a letter from his former self, to his previous and possibly espionage-related career, Robin quickly discovers his new identity offers little protection from several would-be assassins. Seizing the chance to evade his pursuers for good, he volunteers for a three-year experiment, devised by history professors, to simulate the "dark ages" of early-twenty-first-century society. As a participant in the guise of a middle-class housewife, Robin initially feels secure but soon suspects the experiment may simply be a clever front for his, or her, enemies. Stross amusingly recasts our own era into one of "meaningless customs" while blending suspenseful action with inventive, futuristic technology. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ace (June 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441015085
• ISBN-13: 978-0441015085
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #153,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles Stross, 47, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 Hugo awards for best novella, Stross's works have been translated into over twelve languages.

Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst).

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#77 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

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#77 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

#95 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Science Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stross's Best So Far July 1, 2006

By Matthieu Hausig VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Glasshouse is the latest SF novel from Charles Stross and is so far his best. The premise of the novel is that in a far-future society recovering from a war, several of the combatants have elected to wipe their memories and have enlisted in an experimental recreation of the Dark Ages aka the 1950s-2040. Not surprisingly for Stross, the cause of the war was the future equivalent of a computer virus or more accurately a worm.
Despite the technological underpinnings, Glasshouse works better than Stross's prior novels in not overwhelming the reader with jargon. This isn't to say that Glasshouse skimps on extrapolative technologies of Stross's other SF work. The SF elements are omnipresent but there is less reliance on infodumps and where they are used they are enmeshed in the storyline. Its also refreshing to have a break from the deus ex machina of technological superiority that took some of the edge off of Singularity Sky and Accelerando.
Overall, Glasshouse is an excellent showing by Stross. It will undoubtedly be shortlisted for the Hugo and stands a good chance winning in 2007.

58 of 64 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Re-read your Cordwainer Smith!! September 16, 2006

By R. Kelly Wagner

Format:Hardcover

While this book contains references to many SF books of the 50's and 60's, what it mainly is, is an homage to the author Cordwainer Smith, who was really Paul Anthony Linebarger. Apparently, no other reviewers have mentioned this, yet I find it one of the most important things about this book. Smith/Linebarger wrote SF for only a few years, right around 1960, and no one since has written anything like his stuff. In this book, Stross manages to incorporate some of Smith's recurring themes, and tie them into his own recurring vision of a post-Singularity techno-human future, while also bringing in new takes on the old idea of generation ships. Some of the obvious references include one of our protagonist Robin's past lives as a "Linebarger Cat" and there are others that will be familiar to those of us who have read Smith. Those of you who haven't read Smith - well, this will be a fun read anyway, a fast-paced story of recovering from interstellar warfare with dubious psychological help. But you really should go back and read Cordwainer Smith. His few novels and many short stories are collected into less than half a dozen paperbacks; get them while you're at it.

Why, you say, should I read SF written before I was born? Because it's part of the history of the genre, and HISTORY IS IMPORTANT - that's the main point of the book!

The ideas include: what makes us human? Is it human shape? Is it being able to reproduce, creating other humans? Is it free will? Is there such a thing as free will? Stross does not concentrate on religion as much as Smith did, and Stross's ideas about it are a bit more simplistic, but he pays every bit as much attention to free will, and to being able to shape the environment one wants to live in.... In Smith's books, the Instrumentality of Mankind had to decide whether to allow people to make mistakes again, and to allow them to live in environments which are not perfect, instead of protecting them (cf. "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard"); here, Stross plays with the idea of psychological conditioning to give people the lives they *should* want, and with erasing memories in order to control people. Smith's part-animal Underpeople had limitations on their reproduction, but some overlooked Underpeople started having thoughts of being their own owners and of raising their children free of the conditioning given servants; Stross has humans who have forgotten natural reproduction and are being co-erced into it in order to bring children up unaware of freedom.

There is more here - wordplay in the Asian-ish names of organizations and some people is another connection to Smith, for example, but there are also subtle bits of humor that seem to invoke everything from fantasies with too many elves and swords, to a person who seems to have become a unicorn My Little Pony. We even get some *really* old classics - "Never bring a knife to a gun fight," for example.

In short: it can be read and enjoyed as a decent, fast-paced thriller combining space war and some post-human body modification/back-yourself-up-on-computer cyberpunk, but it can be enjoyed even more as a way to connect those genres to some of the greatest science fiction of the 1950's and 1960's, the stuff that kept the genre from dying out as just a fad. Read more ›

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Next year's Hugo winner? September 23, 2006

By Elisabeth Carey

Format:Hardcover

Decisions, decisions. Is this the best book this year, or is Rainbows End (by Vernor Vinge)?

Glasshouse is set later in the same univers as Accelerando, but the story is completely separate and it's not necessary to have read the earlier book. Robin wakes up in a clinic, recovering from memory surgery which has eliminated most of his memory for the period of about an old-fashioned human lifetime. He meets a woman, Kay, who's also recovering from (rather less extreme) memory surgery, and they hit it off--but he also quickly discovers that someone is trying to kill him. He suspects this is because of something he did during the blank period--the little he remembers hints that he was a soldier (a tank?) in the Censorship Wars. At the suggestion of his therapist, he signs on with an experimental social/historical reconstruction, which will put him in a safely sealed environment for a year or two. Kay says she's planning to sign on, too, and they agree to look for each other inside.

Robin wakes up inside the experiment as a woman, now named Reeve. The experiment is an attempt recreate the social culture of a period about which most information has been lost--1950 to 2050. The experimental subjects have to pair off as married couples, and live according to rules that are a nightmare version of 1950s, with technology that's closer to the early 21st century. Individuals gain or lose points according to how well they comply with the rules, and the entire cohort is scored by how well its members do overall. Reeve pairs off with a man named Sam, and suspects that a woman named Cass may be Kay.

Reeve gets off to a bad start because, quite simply, she can't believe how stupid the rules are. No nudity. No wearing the other gender's clothes.... When she wants to buy tools, she has to say they're gifts for her husband, Sam. Sam is assigned a job, so he's gone all day. She has nothing to do but go shopping and do household chores, but all the money she has to spend is what he earns, which makes them both uncomfortable.

But this is the good period, before Reeve and Sam and a few others start to notice that there's something seriously wrong. Reeve starts to suspect that the experimenters are in fact war criminals, agents of the Curious Yellow worm at the root of the Censorship Wars, very likely the people who were trying to kill him on the outside. She needs to get out, she needs to warn--somebody--but they're all inside, not a normal habitat, spread out and linked by A- and T-gates, but a glasshouse, a military prison on board a starship, a Mobile Archive Sucker, with only one long-distance T-gate, firmly under the control of the bad guys.

And the bad guys have all the weapons, all the zombie manpower they need, and an expert and ruthless memory surgeon. Reeve has a couple of people she can almost trust, a crippled memory, and the ghost of memories of skills needed to fight back.

Fantasically good.

(As a last note, I'd like to point out that R. Kelly Wagner is only partially right: the reason you should read some sf written before you were born, and specifically Cordwainer Smith/Paul Linebarger's sf, because is because you're missing out on some fantastically good reading if you don't. The added layer of understanding and enjoyment of Glasshouse and a lot of other things is just an added bonus.) Read more ›

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost Gave Up On It March 29, 2008

By Fyodor

Format:Hardcover

This is really strange to the point of being wacky at times, especially in the beginning. He invents a lot of new technologies, and I had a hard time figuring out what things were what and how they were supposed to work until about midway through the book. Apparently I can't tell my T-gates from my A-gates.

The technology in Stross' universe allows people to create or to become anything they can imagine, which really makes it more of a fantasy type of novel than anything else(there are blue centaurs and four armed people). You really have to check your brain at the door for a lot of the book.

He gets into the meaning of identity; physical appearances, external surroundings, memory, and he thoroughly screws with the three to entertaining results. He really doesn't get too deep or philosophical in his examination of identity, which I would have liked to see, but nevertheless he uses the constantly shifting appearances of his characters for a few fun twists. I also like how he envisions the future of warfare being almost exclusively psycological. Still, in the end it's the kind of book that you have to want to enjoy. The ending left me smiling at least.