Glasshouse (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls..." (more)
Key Phrases: ice ghouls, score whores, memory surgery, Curious Yellow, City Hall, Invisible Republic (more...)

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)
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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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ace Hardcover (June 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441014038
• ISBN-13: 978-0441014033
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #476,952 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Matthieu Hausig (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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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.

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	R. Kelly Wagner "[e-mail]" (MD, United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Science does not overwhelm an absorbing story, July 11, 2006

By	J. Burke "jcburke1" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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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...