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When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It's the 27th century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees' personalities and target historians. The civil war is over and Robin has been demobilized, but someone wants him out of the picture because of something his earlier self knew. On the run from a ruthless pursuer, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity, the Glasshouse, constructed to simulate a pre-accelerated culture. Participants are assigned anonymized identities: it looks like the ideal hiding place for a posthuman on the run. But in this escape-proof environment, Robin will undergo an even more radical change, placing him at the mercy of the experimenters--and the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
Glasshouse is a sequel of sorts to Accelerando, set in the same narrative future, but without any shared characters or locations. Unlike Accelerando, it is really a
Stross might have called the story Decelerando, since it mostly takes place in an attempted simulation of the "dark ages," i.e. the terrestrial 20th/21st-century. Having his male narrating character enter that simulation as a housewife allows Stross to make a variety of observations about contemporary gender roles, reminding me somewhat of Sturgeon's Venus-Plus-X.
Ultimately, though, this book is an espionage thriller with the sort of psychological touches that only the post-Singularity science fictional setting could afford. It reads very quickly, with a fair share of drollery.
Stross' experience working in IT is often evident in his work, and this novel is no exception. He tends to repurpose current ideas in technology and computers and imagine how they might influence humans after a technological singularity. This time, it takes the form of a sort of network civilization. Polities (sovereign political units) comprise many habitation units which are possibly, but probably not, colocated in real-space and which are connected to each other via trusted teleport gates. Teleport gates to other polities are go through demilitarized zones where people's signal streams are run through firewalls that detect subversive tendencies, viruses they might be carrying, etc.
Identity is a significant issue in this book. In a society where people are regularly disassembled for teleport, backed up and restored upon their "death," copied multiple times and remerged, and wiped of their memories of previous "lives," concepts of body and gender are nearly nonexistent, while the idea what comprises the self is enlarged and held to be paramount. Murder is an minor crime, while identity theft and true destruction of a person (deleting all backups) are held to be the most heinous.
Based on that, I approached Glasshouse with mixed feelings. As is normal with Stross’ books, we’re in a future human setting, post a Singularity-type event (which Stross calls the Acceleration) where biology and cybernetics have become intertwined, smart AIs are the norm, and human individuals routinely download their memories, wipe out bad ones, edit others and save back-up copies of themselves in case of inconveniencies like death.
The problem with Glasshouse is that too much of the book is occupied with an extended satire on late 20th Century morals and mores, which is not as clever, original or as amusing as Stross seems to think it is. The central character, in an attempt to escape assassins he believes are after him, volunteers to become part of a historical recreation project. Because of the rapid Acceleration, much of the historical information relating to exactly how pre-Acceleration cultures – our cultures essentially - worked has been lost. Now, researchers aim to investigate how it all worked by putting a handful of volunteers into a historical simalcrum and making them live as late 20th Century humans would have lived. To add to the immense hilarity, Stross has the male main character playing a female character in the simalcrum. Maybe it’s just me, but I found Stross’ satire tedious and dry, and kept waiting for the book to kick up a gear. It does attempt to – something, inevitably, is rotten with the set-up in the simalcrum – but even when it does, it never really manages to grip, and the plot twists are telegraphed so clumsily that they practically shout themselves from the moment the respective elements are introduced.
The ending is oddly anti-climatic, and in the end the book is a damp squib. It’s technically all fine, and there are some brilliant ideas in it, both new ones - I loved the idea of the lead character having spent some time in his past as an entire pissed off tank regiment in a war – and continuations of old themes Stross has worked on, but it’s not enough to keep the interest level up.
The setting is the far future. Individual consciousness has become largely transferrable and malleable, to the extent that beings can inhabit any number of bodily vessels and memories can be adjusted or even totally wiped in order to forge new beginnings. Our narrator in this tale has just undergone such a “memory wipe” and finds himself the target of assassins, for reasons unknown to him. Under these circumstances, he enrolls in a psychiatric experiment which he believes provides him safety from his pursuers. The experiment involves immersion into a controlled environment meant to simulate life in the first Dark Ages (1950-2040). You can imagine how some of our current (and recently past) customs and mores, especially in the realm of sexual politics, might appear to more highly advanced cultures.
In any event, there are surprises in store for our narrator as he enters and becomes familiar with Glasshouse (the experimental polity). As I mentioned before, reading Stross is not akin to reading Asimov or Scalzi. There are layers upon layers of meaning in much of his writing, along with social commentary not usually associated with other science fiction writing, or handled in a far more subtle manner. Nevertheless, this novel is certainly approachable (though it takes a turn toward the confusing at about page 225), and can be enjoyed by virtually any fan of good, hard science fiction.
Interesting technology and psychology make this an interesting read, though it feels like he's trying to imitate Banks.
The novel contains a lot of the typical sci-fi trappings of barely thinkable technology, shape shifting and regeneration and
As part of a “historical” experiment, a group of people are placed in a microcosm where they have to live as if in the “dark ages” which happen to be a recreation of the ancient Urth years around 2000. (The novel uses an odd time system based only on seconds, so you read references to times like “gigaseconds ago.” Just ignore it; it’s not important to the story.)
As participants, people gain and lose points for themselves and their team (cohort) based on how closely they act according to the socially acceptable practices of the times. This is where Stross gets to rip us apart and make us think of our value systems and what we hold important. For example, part of the story line is about an abusive husband that is raping and torturing his wife. There are no point penalties for either, however, others are afraid to interfere because there IS a penalty for “interrupting the sanctity of a marriage.” This situation is remedied by one of the characters in a bloody fashion.
Other ideas addressed include mob psychology, peer pressure, gender roles and autocratic governments. Overall, I enjoyed the book but the end wasn’t very fulfilling. It seems that Stross just got bored and ended it as quickly as possible.
It's interesting but just not me.
The participants are given random, anonymous identities (Robin is turned into a woman named Reeve). Along with Sam, her "husband," they are placed into what looks like Smalltown, USA. They are given little, or no, idea as to just what they are supposed to do. All the couples are electronically monitored; during mandatory church services on Sunday, any faults or misdeeds are pointed out to everyone. Reeve is one of the few who begins to realize that something is really wrong. Their contract specifies a minimum amount of time to be in the study, approximately 3 years, but does not specify a maximum amount of time. The town has become a very high-tech panopticon. The women have suddenly become fertile, and several female participants have become pregnant. Perhaps the idea is to create a new race of people who don't know that there is an outside world. Perhaps it has to do with this new race re-infecting the rest of humanity with a new and improved version of Curious Yellow.
Here is a wonderful piece of writing. The best part is the author's look at present-day life. He does not just needle it or poke fun at it, he rips it to pieces and stomps on what is left. The rest of the book is also very much worth reading. This gets two strong thumbs-up.
Set in the future, omnipresent atomic assemblers and point-to-point transporters have changed humanity itself. Stross fascinatingly explores the ramifications of this
* Providing a standard time and identity authentication being the core roles of governments.
* Weapons
* Weapons containing wormholes that open to release their payload instead of firing a bullet (i.e. radiation from a star).
* Shutting down a botnet by severing enough links that the network exhausts its bandwidth keeping the network state intact.
* Temporarily cordoning off memory by severing links, which reconnect at a predictable rate.
* Encouraging/discouraging behavior with a points system shared with a group - participants moderate each other (and recognize that murder has a comparatively low cost).
* Sex becoming a personal choice (reinforced by reversing the gender role of our protagonist).
* Digitizing consciousness, allowing for "back ups" of people.
* Multiple parallel copies of a personality that can have their state vectors merged.
* Digital existence and widespread nano-assembly making everyone immortal, and changing the meaning of time. Stross reinforces this effectively with metric-second time relations (megasecond, kilosecond, etc) throughout the book.
* Future society putting a large value on free information, and our generation becoming a "dark age" due to no information exchange standards, and incompatible and fallible storage mediums.
* Future wars being fought over censorship.
It's rapidly apparent that there's the technology for memory editing (and backing yourself up), changing body shapes at will and so forth. There's also been a war recently.
There are quite a few twists and turns, like when the lead
There's some deep, thought-provoking writing about looking back at the past, identity and so forth, and a fun story too, especially if you like characters that don't know if they can trust themselves and their memories.
However, while I like this novel it's possibly not the best book to start with for someone wanting to try Stross. This is seeing as the main character Robin (a historian turned intelligence operative) is something of a victim turned sociopath, but not as charismatic as Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs. I should relate more than I do, but Stross's characters who are copies of copies tend to leave me cold.
Not a bad story. The universe and technology would have given material for a lot better one, though. Stross has shown themself capable of producing a great story. Inevitably there will be ones that are not great. This seems to be one.
Stross's conception of the self strikes me as insufficiently psychosomatic. In Glasshouse, the "I" is software along for the ride in whatever hardware or wetware it finds itself. It might be copied poorly, disrupted by a virus, tweaked in certain ways, but there's
It's not clear to me why the spreaders of the Curious Yellow virus should have selected a group of war criminals as the virus's new breeding stock. Anyone who, having the choice of billions to form a compliant polity, chooses several hundred professional killers deserves whatever they suffer.
I'm already tired of the 'I'm the one [whatever] that can save the universe, if only I can figure out what's really happening' plot. Got this in Dune; in Kiln People; and now in Glass House. Hoping for something different, something more humble from the next sci-fi.
That said, I had a lot of fun with this. Things blew up real nice. Its politics are liberal live-and-let live (which is to say, unradical and Fukuyaman, locating ideology 'out there' among the fanatics); its conception of suburbia a mixture of Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery' and Madeline l'Engle; and its choice to have several amnesiac, sexy war criminals as its heroes...weird.