Customer Reviews

Glasshouse

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

One of the best Sci Fi books I have read this year: believable characters with both depth and raw "edges", extremely inventive situation, easily understood sci-fiction to enable the action and complications, and fascinating background history to make the "now" more believable, plus he keeps you guessing. The author gets better with each book.
The surroundings are simultaneously recognizable and ultimately weird and threatening, a real achievement for an author. He uses some of the strongest prejudices of our current world and society (go read the synopsis) and throws them into a pot of great fictional science and life-threatening situations.
If I had any negative comment at all its that he wraps it up too quickly with less detail than when he spins the web and takes us through the complications. There's more of the "mopping up", plus surrounding/subsequent story that I want to know, but perhaps the next book...

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.)

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.

I have read 3 great sci-fi novels this year despite the fact fewer scifi novels are being written and what is written is not always great. It seems more difficult to write scifi these days, the future seems harder to see, especially the near future. Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge were my two favorites this year but then Glasshouse came out. I hestitated at even picking up Glasshouse, I have not been a big fan of Charles Stross's earlier novels. I felt there was something missing for me in those novels but it each new novel has been better than the last. Glasshouse is exceptional and entertaining. You can read Publishers Weekly and Booklist reviews above to see what the book is about, but I do want to add it is a mix of hard scifi, mystery, "Joe Haldemann military scifi" and yes, romance. Stross has written a novel that allows you to totally connect to the characters, to feel as if you are there all the while making you want to read it through the night. I highly recommend this novel!

~
"A dark-skinned human with four arms walks towards me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. She's interested in me."

So opens GLASSHOUSE, Stross's latest and best (so far) novel, set in the Invisible Republic, a splinter-polity recovering from the Censorship Wars. Here's Robin, the protagonist: "When people ask me what I did during the war, I tell them I used to be a tank regiment. Or maybe I was a counter-intelligence agent. I'm not exactly sure: my memory isn't what it used to be."

Robin has hot monkey-love with skull-clad Kay, and they both sign up for an experimental historical-roleplaying project, which has the stated objective of recreating one of the historic Dark Ages, c. 1950-2040 AD. You won't be surprised to hear that (cue ominous music) Things are Not as they Seem. A twisty, engrossing and very well-done paranoia-thriller ensues.

It's the 27th century. People have moved to space, in habitats around brown-dwarf stars, linked by instantaneous T-gate wormholes. Their health, wealth and daily sundries are supplied by A-gates, nanotech assemblers that can store, edit and recreate most anything, including the posthumans. But the security on the gate network, well, wasn't....

I had a whole lot of fun reading GLASSHOUSE, which is a spicy blend of bleeding-edge SF extrapolation, cool, complex characters, an amazing number of plot-twists, and wonderful storytelling. This is a mature work, with the author in full control of his tools. The book has the feel of Robert Heinlein at his best: a matter-of-fact recounting of daily life in a far-future world that's taken some very strange turns.

Stross's energy and imagination never flag, and the book comes to a satisfying (if a bit formulaic) conclusion. Look for it on next year's award-ballots. Highly recommended.

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

In the future human consciousness is backed up by A-gate nanotechnology and humans live unlimited lives with an infinite amount of body designs to choose from. These A-gates provide a cornucopia of options and create a virtual immortality. Enter Curious Yellow, a deadly virus that alters A-gate technology and helps destroy the Republic.

After the censorship war between the progenitors of Curious Yellow and the republic, war veterans voluntarily erase their minds and live in an experimental `Glasshouse' that recreates the dark ages (our present day.)

Robin/Reeve, the protagonist tries to live in a experimental village that attempts to recreate our present day, since most data records from our period are digitally encrypted and indecipherable in the future. What occurs is an often amusing interpretation of our present by people living in the 27th century.

Charles Stross eviscerates social protocol & religious dogma with his interpretation of what the future will perceive of our present day. There are some funny moments too, when pizza is an odd amalgamation of Chinese takeout and traditional pizza, the past is lost in translation at times. Robin/Reeve struggles to adapt in the dogmatic and petty Glasshouse regulations while also experiencing fugue on his past life during the censorship wars. Great book, really enjoyed it

No, this is not some sci-fi porn novel but another Singularity tale, this time hundreds of years after the Censorship Wars. The period 1950-2040 AD is known as the "Dark Ages" because of a nanovirus, Curious Yellow, that wiped out selective memories of a specific era during teleportation. For sheer inventiveness, it is rivaled only by the "Sky" virus in Alastair Reynolds's "Chasm City" that infected the victim with worship of a Messiah figure. Both stories have their moment of awareness, when the hero or heroine suddenly realizes the truth and the reader nods slowly as it hits.
Future technology seems magical but even if one can live forever, would one want to in a society of cruelty and caprice, where one dies multiple times, loses memories or even their identities? The very things we consider human - our physical body, our sexual choices, our personality, even our memories - are all constantly in flux.

As we approach the Singularity the rate of change increases exponentially. The difference between that era and the "current one" (2700 AD) with its emotional machines (nod to Kurzweil), malleable matter and altered appearance is illustrated through an experiment in which unwitting participants find themselves in the Glasshouse, an outer space construct set to resemble an Ozzie and Harriet society. The setting is forced at times - women had to wear dresses, cook and take care of home & hubby like Stepford wives (a big influence in this book) while men earned the bacon, wore suits and ties, watched sports and beat their wives. Both attended church every Sunday. Robin/Reeve, the hero/heroine, is only one of a number of former war criminals who had their memories erased and are now being rehabilitated. Unknown to them, the place is being used in a scheme to establish a behaviorial dictatorship. While not as mind-blowing as Accelerando it is a much more cohesive story and the presentation of the unreal future is done so matter of factly it is scary.

Mr Grade: A

Charles Stross's extremely clever, if extremely loopy, "Glasshouse" imagines a far future of travel by teleportation (through assembler gates--wait for it), body alterations, physical backups, and a worm that reprograms people's memories.

The hero is (a male) named Robin who's just gone through memory erasure (perhaps voluntarily). In order to avoid what he believes are assassins pursuing him, he volunteers for an experiment in which people live as they did during the "dark ages." Although the dark ages in question are the 20th and 21st centuries.

Stross has a clever idea: the records from the earlier part of the period, when paper and ink was still the primary method of data storage, will have proved more durable than electronic storage, in which data has been lost due to the constant procession of different, competing storage devices. Anyhow, the world Robin (now a female named Reeve) finds (her)self in has late-20th/early 21st-century tech (mobile phones, microwaves), but a social structure from the period of 50 years before, with men going to work and women staying home.

Robin/Reeve, however, quickly discovers that the danger to (her)self lies precisely within the parameters of the experiment, and not with assassins without. Of course, she tries to do something about this, and the thrills start.

The book's a kick, with wild speculations, hat-tips to Franz Kafka, Alice Sheldon, Paul A. Linebarger, the old "The Prisoner" tv miniseries, and the computer worm that's featured so prominently in the book is named Curious Yellow. But maybe Mr. Stross isn't quite as clever as he thinks he is; sometimes the breathless first-person present-tense narration by Robin/Reeve devolves into cute or technobabble. And the ending feels rushed. But it will sustain your interest over the course of its 333 cramped pages packed with too-small print. (You'll need to visit your opthalmologist when you finally put the book aside.) Some publishers have been improving the look and feel of their small-size paperbacks. This publisher has not joined the party.