Title Glasshouse Series --- Author Charles Stross Cover Art Rita Frangie Publisher Ace Books - 2006 First Printing Ace Books - 2006 Category Science Fiction Warnings Violence, rape Main Characters Robin/Reeve, Kay, Cass, Sam, Fiore, Janis Main Elements Cyberpunk

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 twenty-seventh 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 and searching for a place to hide, 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 at the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche...

I was a little dubious at the start. See, it was like a futuristic SF version of Highlander, people running around in kilts with swords, killing each other because, well, they are having trouble remembering their past and that's frustrating so they need to vent their frustration through mortal violence. Of course people can just be rebooted from a saved copy but I was worried that set this book up for non-stop gratuitous violence.

But fortunately that didn't turn out to be. Inside the Glasshouse, an experiment being run by supposed historian to see how life functioned in the early 21st century (that's right, us), these people whose pasts had been mostly wiped out were placed in a world that is sort of like ours, but not quite. After all it was rebuilt based on spotty historical records (though surprisingly accurate for all that, doubt we could do the same for what we call the Dark Ages). But in our world people didn't go around killing each other because they were grumpy, and if you got hurt you had the heal the old fashioned way, can just regen a new arm. So they had to be a little more careful about their bodies, bodies unfamiliar to them as big and strong male Robin finds himself a weak and tiny female Reeve. Where people could walk about as blue centaurs or with four arms, many find the bodies they are assigned to be uncomfortable and restrictive. And ugh, as a female you have to menstruate, such horrors!

My main gripes with the book were in the details. For example Reeve sees a bird for the first time and calls it a "feathered dinosaur", cute...but if a future generation of humans can remember that birds are descended from dinosaurs, they can also probably remember the word "bird". Reeve is also able to recognize a tabletop covered in "herbivore hide"...leather of course, but what's the chance of knowing where leather comes from without remembering the word leather? I think Stross was just trying to be cute or funny but it just came out nonsensical.

He also invented a new way of keeping track of time, which is fine, this is far, far in the future, everyone calculates everything in seconds (like gigaseconds). Of course that's hard for the reader to convert into meaningful time so Stross helpfully puts into parenthesis the conversion in days...but that completely defeats the purpose of coming up with new terminology, you know it's no good if throughout the entire book you don't expect your readers to learn the lingo.

I also had to work pretty hard at the start to figure out the context of the world. There were two types of gates, T-gates allowed people to pass physically through them, while A-gates converted you into data and transferred you electronically. Took a while to figure out that they were physical people that could essentially transfer themselves into a virtual world and then back again. They lived in a hybrid of both realms. But this was a good kind of work, something a reader should be expected to use their brain cells for (as opposed to pulling out a calculator to convert seconds into years...)

The Glasshouse of course explores our current place and time and maybe pokes a bit of fun at our customs, but also shows how many humans under certain influences never change. Like the mob, where a bunch of perfectly normal people just seem to lose control because everyone else it losing control around you and it somehow makes it ok to vandalize and even kill, a kind of perverted hive-mind. Or the evils of peer-pressure, where to ensure that people play the simulation to the best of their abilities, points were added where you behaved like you should (like got a job, got married, had kids) but points were removed if you acted out of character (being naked in public is no big deal in the future but that's not allowed here). And to add to the pressure, there are group scores. So those that want to win the most points put pressure on the rest to conform. The two of the three people running the experiment interact with the subjects as clergy, not just a position of power, but one of religion. The third is a doctor.

One thing I particularly enjoyed is the unreliable narrator. Being a first person narrative, we see everything through Reeve's point of view. She has several limitations. First, she's had her memory erased so she keeps getting flashbacks about how she even ended up in this experiment in the first place, we learn there is a lot more going on than expected, but in brief confusing spurts. We only understand what's happening around her through her ability to talk to other characters (who could lie to her) and what she happens to read or learn to do. Finally, we're talking about a world where people can manipulate the mind. The just don't erase memories, they can also alter behaviour (like if you need a soldier you can wipe out his empathy) and their bodies (said soldier could be designed to run on power packs instead of food and oxygen and have hardened skin and huge mass). And don't forget people can be duplicated too, as many copies as you want. So your own trusted narrator could be manipulated, with the result of manipulating the reader.

Anyway, I'm sure there are better cyberpunk books out there, but as I've only read Ready Player One, I don't have much to compare with. In the end I found it ok, it was worth the read but doubt I'll feel any strong urge to read it again.