John Scalzi claims to be a gateway drug into science fiction literature, I suppose he may well be but I believe Charles Stross is almost the opposite of that. Stross is deservedly one of the most popular active sci- fi authors today but readers not familiar with the genre may find him a little bewildering. His target readership seems to be those who are quite au fait with the common tropes of the genre and also some computer programming terms. Those “in the know” love the science he puts in books like Accelerando and The Atrocity Archives while the likes of me struggle. I certainly had problems understanding much of these two books but less so with Singularity Sky. It did occur to me that his fiction is probably not for me but I keep coming back to try again because I like his wit and imagination, plus he is a great guy and very approachable to readers in online forums and such. Today I am happy to say I have finally found a Stross novel that I absolutely love and works completely for me. It is Glasshouse.This Hugo nominated novel is set in the 27th century when our 21st century is viewed as part of “The Dark Ages”, presumably pre-singularity (called “the acceleration” here). Most of the book takes place in a sealed experimental environment where participants sign up to reenact life in the 21st century for research purposes. The protagonist starts off as a man named Robin who has part of his memory deleted for reasons unknown, presumably to forget some traumatic experience that he wants to do without. After he signed up for the isolated social experiment he backs himself up and his backed up personality wakes up inside the experiment as a woman called Reeve who has no idea why she has chosen to change her gender. She soon settles down to a married life of a nuclear family as part of the experiment, but begins to feel that the “experiment” is not really an experiment and some very disturbing things are going on.Io9 calls Glasshouse “One of Stross' most challenging books”, I have not read enough of his books to confirm or deny this but I do find it to be his most accessible book so far. Certainly some tech expositions still go over my head but they never impede the storytelling. Whenever I don’t feel inclined to Google the programming terms I was able to gloss over them and enjoy the story. I do hope many more Stross books are like this, and I intend to find out. I don’t remember any of Stross’ characters from his other books that I have read but I doubt I will forget the main characters in this book. This is particularly true for Robin/Reeve whose experience and character growth is unlike anything I have read before. The book is surprisingly feministic in tone after Robin becomes Reeve. Stross seems to have a lot of empathy for the trials and tribulations of womanhood. The emotions, the interactions with other women, the social pressure etc. are all convincingly portrayed (I hesitate to say accurately portrayed as I am not of the gender). Interestingly once Robin’s backup is activated as Reeve we have no idea what becomes of the original Robin, but with all these backups and restores we don’t even know whether the original Robin ever appears in this book. As for Reeve, she has to be one of the most unreliable narrators ever (I won't tell you why though).Of course regularly readers of Charles Stross are probably not exactly looking for books that deal with feminist issues, I imagine the cool tech to be his main attraction. Glasshouse is stuffed to the gills with cool sci-fi tech. The posthumanism reminds me of both Altered Carbon and Permutation City*, the memory editing is similar to PKD’s short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (filmed a couple of times as “Total Recall”). However, this is not a derivative novel, the sum of the different influences make for a very original book which is mind blowing, thought provoking and even poignant at times. The wilds ideas and amazing tech are underpinned by a surprisingly touching story of a loving relationship.Glasshouse is definitely the best Charles Stross book I have read so far and I hope that even better ones are in store for me.__________________________* Unlike the virtual world featured in Permutation City, the social experiment of Glasshouse takes place in an actual physical environment where the activated digitized personalities are stored in human bodies.
With this book, Charles Stross has established himself as one of my favourite authors. Previously, I have read quite a few of his novels, including several of the Merchant Princes series, one of the Bob Howard – Laundry books, Halting State and Saturn’s Children. With the exception of Saturn’s Children and perhaps the first of the Merchant Princes novels, I’ve had a hard time immersing myself in his stories and actually liking his characters. I keep picking up his books, however, as I like his concepts. Then I read Saturn’s Children. What a fabulous book. The mixture of hard science and futuristic culture with a treatise on what it is to be human fascinated me. I loved the concept. And, the author’s sense of humour made the characters leap off the page. The main character, Freya, wasn’t entirely loveable, she had her faults. But that’s the point of a good book, isn’t it? To take a character and have them evolve. Which is exactly what happens in The Glasshouse. Robin has just emerged from radical memory surgery. It’s the far future and people live for a long time, a century or two (it’s hard to figure out exactly how long as time is measured in groups of seconds with names like teraquad and I’m just not good at math), and people with a lifetime’s worth of memories sometimes need a fresh start to go with their consistently youthful bodies. Unlike most people who emerge from such a procedure, however, Robin literally has no idea who he is. He hasn’t just had the memory of a love affair gone wrong excised, he’s lost entire lifetimes and people. Concepts, even.While he’s in recovery, he meets Kay, a woman who has had a much less radical procedure to help her forget the impact of having lived among (and studied) a less advanced culture for several generations. Together, they decide to check into an experimental polity (city-state in space) designed to emulate twentieth century Earth. The time period is considered a dark age of human history and most records of the how and why (we even survived such a travesty of existence) have long since disappeared. Robin and Kay, unencumbered by memory, are perfect candidates for the experiment. Following Robin and Kay’s progress through the experiment would be an interesting enough story. There are complications, however. The experiment is not what it seems, Robin is not who he thought he was (I know, this is funny because no one knows who he is) and Kay has her own trials. The novel is an adventure story, an exploration of a possible future with all sorts of scientific concepts that are nothing short of awesome, a comment on our own history and fallibility as a species and culture, a summation of the history of a universe created by Charles Stross and, finally, it’s a love story. I liked Robin at the beginning of the book, I loved him at the end. He discovered himself (his memories) and himself, who he was as a person. And then, he evolved. It was fascinating to see who he became.As the mystery unfolded, it became harder and harder to put this book down. The plot kept thickening and I wanted to keep reading. The author’s humour, as always, continued to delight me, coming at unexpected turns and entirely welcome after tense moments. The writing is just superb. Charles Stross communicates his concepts, his ideas and his characters so well. A lot of science fiction (fiction) is social commentary. Stross manages to convey his point of view without arrogance. He has a quietly confident opinion and it makes sense. Well, to me it does. I like his point of view.I’ve also decided I really like his books. I’ve just started reading Singularity Sky and I’m enjoying it and I’m optimistic enough to go back and try to read Halting State all over again, particularly as he’s just released a sequel.
What do You think about Glasshouse (2006)?
I started this particular book because it was sold to me as "far future thriller wherein the protagonist enters a reenactment of 1900s Earth in order to elude his attackers, only to discover and more sinister plot within the reenactment." Taking 1900s to mean Victorian/Edwardian period, I thought this book might be right up my alley. I have a fondness for far future science fiction, and a fondness for Victoriana, and a fondness for thrillers in general. How could this book possibly go wrong?It turns out that 1900s actually translates to a rough approximation of the 1950s, so that was a bit disappointing. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Stross's take on the far future, a weird, wonderful place with loving nods to the master of far future science fiction, Cordwainer Smith.The story is well-paced, and the premise is intriguing. Ultimately, however, the plot doesn't make a lot of sense. This can be a problem in far future fictional settings where the scope of your technology outpaces the scope of your 21st-century human brain, and Stross blunders into this a number of times. The biggest problem with this book, as far as I'm concerned, is its treatment of gender identity. I felt it was badly handled all around, and that "women" (such as the term applies in this setting) in particular were often poorly characterized stereotypes. I don't know Charles Stross, but I couldn't help but get the impression that he was rubbing his hands together gleefully while writing this book, imagining the Tiptree award he was bound to win. He seemed to be intentionally pushing gender buttons for that effect. His ideas about gender and identity are interesting but ultimately unconvincing, and at times even troubling. This was the largest turn off for me. Not only did I feel the gender roles were poorly written from the perspective of a far future, gender optional society, I felt that they were poorly written in a 20th-century context. Stross doesn't seem to understand his female characters (his characters that WANT to be female, I should say), and I can't help but think this book would have been better if someone had pointed this out to him.Where does that leave Glasshouse? It's an enjoyable yarn if you don't think about it too hard. There are lots of cool ideas to be had. If you're easily turned off by poorly written female characters, however, you might find Glasshouse isn't your cup of tea.
—Kevin
(My full review of this book is larger than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)As I've mentioned here before, although as an adult I try to maintain as varied a reading list as possible, I do naturally gravitate regularly towards the science-fiction (or SF) genre on which I was raised, as well as the "weird-lit" novels of our contemporary times that have been influenced by the genre. And indeed, if you take a close look at the projects that are getting so much attention these days among the so-called "creative class" (the same people who mostly make up CCLaP's readership too, by the way), you'll see that now more than ever, mainstream and even academic literature is being influenced in subtle ways more and more by such fantastical genres as SF and weird-lit. When you look at the entertainment choices made by people who are comfortable with technology and spend a decent amount of time online, the world can indeed become a strange place; a place where even among mainstream novels and network television shows, some awfully odd things can happen within the middle of a supposedly straight-ahead character drama.So it's natural, then, that we straight-ahead SF fans would of course especially appreciate so-called "hard" SF writers in this day and age, or those who write such head-scratchingly brilliant stuff that only SF fans in particular are going to appreciate and love it; and boy, you don't get much more fanboy-crazy than with author Charles Stross, a multiple award winner and favorite among fellow SF writers, who nonetheless is barely known beyond the SF community that worships him so much. I just had a chance to read his latest* novel, in fact, 2006's Glasshouse, which happens to be my first novel of his in my own life; and believe me, I now understand why people go so freaking nuts over him, and am already plotting a way to get ahold of one of his earlier novels as quickly as possible. It is a flabbergasting book, one so smart and complex you can scarcely believe it actually exists; one that has a 95-percent chance of officially blowing your mind by the time you're finished, even if you do have a guess at which way the story is headed.So before anything else, I guess let's start with a truism about hard SF...
—Jason Pettus
Stross throws together a fast paced book that reads like a mix of the Prisonor,Philip K. Dick, Moorcock's Dancers at the end of time, Stepford wives, and truman show/pleasantville.(with quite few nods to Tiptree jr/Alice Sheldon and Cordwainer Smith) A mix of entertainment and ideas. Stross has flaws but I was thinking ever couple of pages which makes this a good thing. He is an idea writer like Kobo Abe and Borges(but not really like them), who throws his ideas into genre exercises(but it will blur the borders of any box you try to squeeze it into), good stuff.
—Adam
