Glasshouse [Mass Market Paperback]

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.

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.

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