Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

book data

607 ratings, 3.80 average rating, 103 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		21%
4		46%
3		24%
2		6%
1		1%

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published

June 27th 2006 by Ace Hardcover

binding

Hardcover, 335 pages

literary awards

Prometheus Award Best Novel winner (2007)

isbn

0441014038 (isbn13: 9780441014033)

description

When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone's trying to kill him. It's the tw...more

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Prometheus Award Winners

16 books | 2 voters

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11/25/07

Jason Pettus rated it:

Read in November, 2007

(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,...more (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 <strike>latest</strike>* 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...(less)

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06/05/07

Alex rated it:

bookshelves: 2007hugonominees

Read in July, 2007

Shockingly, I like the first chapter. I expect things will devolve from here. That's the standard Stross formula.

Well, with the exception of having a good first chapter.

***

And as it turns out, I loved this book. I've read several of his novels before, all the Hugo-nominated ones, anyway, and this is by far the best. It's also the best of the nominees this year and should win the award.

Stross does an excellent job of keeping the focus of the novel...more

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06/03/07

Trin rated it:

bookshelves: english-lit, genderfuck, queerlit, sci-fi

Read in June, 2007

In the future, a group of people volunteer for a scientific experiment in which they agree to immerse themselves in a community mimicking long-gone 20th Century life. The protagonist, Robin, signs up to escape people who are trying to kill her. I mean, him. Technically Robin is a dude. But he spends most of the book trapped in a female body, and he mostly just reads as a woman—as an awesome, interesting heroine. It's kind of sad that one of the few ways we get male SF/F writers writing interes...more

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11/04/07

Saadiq rated it:

(review of isbn 0441015085)

Read in November, 2007

Every time I begin a new Charles Stross novel, I feel the same excitement as when I first read William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1985: I'm reading a work of science fiction that is so unique, so bleeding-edge, that I can barely get my head around it.

And then the excitement fades as I continue reading.

This is Stross's best work to-date because it is his most human; his observations on groupthink, peer pressure, and the irrationality of modern life are insightful and funny. ...more

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11/14/08

Imperfectlyrua rated it:

bookshelves: cyber-punk, own, science-fiction

Read in January, 2008

This was the most intriguing new science fiction book I've read in a long time. The plot was kinda standard mystery but everything else was really new. He took some modern technical paradigms, projected them into the future and created an amazingly well developed "world." In addition, the book takes place mostly in an anachronistic simulation of the 1990's. And since the main character is a participant in the experiment there's an interesting ethnographical aspect to the narrative. (eg...more

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08/17/08

Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 0441015085)

Read in August, 2008

recommends it for: fans of Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks

Stross has always been adjacent to the books I'm already reading, forever showing up on recommended lists. So, I figured I'd give him a try.

I enjoyed the book, though it is clearly not for everyone. Stross writes push-the-envelope science fiction. The best way to describe it is as a cross between Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks.

In Stross's future, the galaxy is really just a big routed network with people as very complex data packets. Want to go 300 light years in that dir...more

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05/19/08

Kyle Brady rated it:

bookshelves: scifi-cyberpunk

Read in June, 2008

My first cyberpunk book in many years... and a great one too!

"Glasshouse" deals with a character who isn't really sure who he is, thanks to memory surgery, gets involved with an experiment, and changes genders... all while trying to remember who he/she was, whether or not someone's trying to kill him/her, and many other crucial identity questions.

The book is set a few hundred years in the future where space travel doesn't exist... a network of controlled wormhol...more

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4 comments

10/04/07

Schnaucl rated it:

bookshelves: fiction, october, owned, read_2007, science-fiction

Read in October, 2007

It was really hard to get into at first. For some reason Stross insists on using a different timescale even though their bear a slight linguistic resemblance to terms we use today. It was frustrating and unnecessary. Although it got off to a slow start, it did pick up after the first few chapters (basically when the main character joins the experiment).

I had some of the same problems with this book that I have with similar books where a person's consciousness is treated as though i...more It was really hard to get into at first. For some reason Stross insists on using a different timescale even though their bear a slight linguistic resemblance to terms we use today. It was frustrating and unnecessary. Although it got off to a slow start, it did pick up after the first few chapters (basically when the main character joins the experiment).

I had some of the same problems with this book that I have with similar books where a person's consciousness is treated as though it were basically software with the attendant backups. If people are basically immortal, then death is no longer meaningful. You don't care if characters die because they can simply be reconstructed with only a relatively short time of memory missing. Even when characters suffer a true death, the other characters don't really seem all that affected by it.

Gender is a similar problem. I get the impression that Stross may have been trying to play with gender. Some male characters are put into female bodies and vice versa. The problem is that gender roles no longer exist when anyone can have any body they choose so everyone may as well be androgynous or hermaphroditic.

The experiment tries to recreate the gender roles, but because they aren't internalized it doesn't work very well. I was very aware of gender roles as a social construct in this book. On the other hand, it did allow for what I thought was one of the better lines and points of the book which was that the designers of the experiment took prescriptive literature and treated it as though it were descriptive. I know that's something we do in real life all the time. Just study any ancient society, particularly how they treat women. Ancient Greek women ideally stayed at home and weren't seen by unrelated men but few women could match that ideal.

And because people could slip out of bodies so easily and become whoever they wanted I didn't buy one character having large body issues.

Even when the characters first start the experiment it's a little slow at first because the author is clearly trying to describe things we take for granted from an outside perspective but it gets dull and annoying. Yes, our clothes have to be washed, no, they don't change color or automatically fit right, etc. Without the social context it just isn't all that interesting. Similarly, characters use certain words like new ideas ("whore") for example, and have trouble figuring out what that is, and yet later the same character blithely refers to someone as a scorewhore.

And if murder wasn't that big a deal, why feel guilty for temporarily murdering someone in war? And why does the same person not feel guilty for engaging in duels to the temporary death? And how does one character not know what rape is? The present they come from is hardly Utopian.

I still want to know how it all functions. Yes, they have A gates or T gates to assemble everything, but physics tells us that you can't make something from nothing so they must have to have some kind of raw materials and presumably the gates have some kind of power source.

Overall it was uneven and the very end was predictable.(less)

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05/13/09

Tim added it (review of isbn 0441015085)

bookshelves: sf

Although his writing covers everything from cyberpunk to space opera to alternate history and fantasy, Charlie Stross is, for good or bad, viewed as one of the leading SF authors exploring the Singularity. Fans of that aspect of his writing will be pleased to know that his latest novel, Glasshouse, continues delving into the Singularity. Fans who appreciate Stross' other works will be equally happy to know that Glasshouse explores much more Ââ and that may make it a perfect introductio...more

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01/07/09

Rebecca rated it:

(review of isbn 0441015085)

bookshelves: future-earth, speculative-fiction

Glasshouse is a loose sequel to Accelerando, but you mostly need to know that for what the world is like. You might be able to read Glasshouse as a stand alone.

Anyway, it's late in the third millennium. Humanity has been kicked out of the Solar System by intelligent computer programs who'd rather turn all solid matter into more memory and RAM and photovoltaics, and has taken up residence living around wormholes linking brown dwarfs throughout the galaxy. The presence of massive am...more Glasshouse is a loose sequel to Accelerando, but you mostly need to know that for what the world is like. You might be able to read Glasshouse as a stand alone.

Anyway, it's late in the third millennium. Humanity has been kicked out of the Solar System by intelligent computer programs who'd rather turn all solid matter into more memory and RAM and photovoltaics, and has taken up residence living around wormholes linking brown dwarfs throughout the galaxy. The presence of massive amounts of data storage and matter manipulation has changed humanity remarkably -- at this point, you can look like whatever the heck you want (seriously, you can change sex like changing clothing, and things like being a centaur or growing two more arms are no problem), death is unusual (pretty much you have to have a bad accident or be killed), and you can keep a backup copy around anyway. However, a lot of times people accumulate too much emotional baggage in their long lives, so they end up having to wipe out most of their memories to get a fresh start.

Robin is one such person. He's not quite sure why he had it done -- sure, his past self left him a letter, but it wasn't that helpful. And someone wasn't satisfied with the job and is trying to kill him. Between that, a sense of purposelessness, and a woman he met who was also interested, Robin decides to sign up for an experiment that would keep him off of the net for a couple of years.

See, a lot of the late 20th and early 21st century was lost thanks to data forms going obsolete too quickly to be converted. So some social scientists were going to try to reconstruct it using volunteers. They created a clever social system to encourage participants to play their roles (and mimic the social constraints they believed existed at the time) and beamed everyone into new bodies in a simulation of 1950s America (or Western Europe). Robin became Reeve, a woman, and was partnered up with Sam, another volunteer, as her husband.

At first this is a funny (and a bit unnerving) take on the 1950s. Reeve struggles with norms that make no sense to her (like why the salesclerks won't sell her pants), her female teammates who are 'score whores' and obsessed with racking up points for good behavior and making sure Reeve does the same, finding Kay, the woman Robin knew on the outside, and worrying about Cass, who's husband/partner was turning quickly abusive.

Then Reeve gets a dream message from her previous self, who tells her that something is fishy about the experiment. Previous infiltrators were compromised, so her previous self had volunteered to have a memory wipe to better hide himself to get in.

Overall, I enjoyed this -- it had a mix of Stepford Wives and high tech, and probably would have been better than the recent remake. it does get a bit confusing at one point, since you have to accept that being able to treat human consciousness as data means a lot of things that aren't true right now. Can't say much because of spoilers. But, it was a good read, and the fact Robin/Reeve didn't remember a lot of things made it interesting since it allowed for us to discover Robin/Reeve's past as we read without artifice. (less)

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05/16/09

Paul rated it:

bookshelves: sciencefictionfantasy

Several hundred years from now, humanity has just finished the Censorship Wars. Using an electronic virus called Curious Yellow, it targeted the brains of historians as they used teleportation gates (the major method of transportation). Robin has just emerged from a medical clinic with most of his memory wiped. Perhaps he was one of those targeted historians; he does have memories of being in a tank regiment during the war, not as a soldier, but as a tank. He joins a research program to recreate...more Several hundred years from now, humanity has just finished the Censorship Wars. Using an electronic virus called Curious Yellow, it targeted the brains of historians as they used teleportation gates (the major method of transportation). Robin has just emerged from a medical clinic with most of his memory wiped. Perhaps he was one of those targeted historians; he does have memories of being in a tank regiment during the war, not as a soldier, but as a tank. He joins a research program to recreate the "dark ages," the late 20th and early 21st centuries, by having volunteers live in an actual, recreated "town." It sounds like a good way to get away from whoever is trying to kill him; whatever he did, or was, before his wipe, it must have been important.

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.

(less)

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03/12/09

Bruce rated it:

Read in June, 2008

I am beginning to develop this theory that Charles Stross and Walter Jon Williams are working together behind the scenes.

The description of this book looks like a different take on the same or eerily familiar universe as Stross's Halting State.

Likewise, Implied Spaces grappled with the same ideas behind Stross's Glasshouse. Both of the Williams books appeared well after the Stross books, so maybe it's just that Williams is using heavily Stross's ideas.

But...more

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01/23/09

Mark rated it:

Read in December, 2007

Human society has become completely extra-terrestrial. There are two main types of machines. T-Gates, essentially worm holes, are used for physical transportation. A-gates are nano assemblers that can make anything, including human beings. Humans can back themselves up and use assemblers to recreate their physical bodies while restoring the state vector of their phyches from backup. The story takes place in the wake of a war fought against a power that uses a software worm to edit human memory o...more

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05/11/09

Noel G rated it:

A great book - a plot that has worried sci-fi/philosophical thinkers for aeons. Is what we see really what is there or have we been manipulated to think a certain way?

As with many sci-fi plots, there is a corporation at the heart of the 'evil doings', and a small group of people who know the truth and fight for reality over engineered 'happiness'. The lead characters are, in my opinion, brilliant. The complex issue of the emotions that rage through each of them and the learning cu...more

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06/02/09

Michael Scott rated it:

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in June, 2009

I have mixed feeling about this sci-fi. One the one hand, it introduces a couple of brilliant questions, among which How to deal with the accumulation of information/state/memories? and How does war look like in a all-powerful society?. On the other, after the frenetic start the writing slumps at an accelerated pace, culminating with the poor ending. In comparison with Accelerando, Glasshouse has much fewer innovative elements, way more mis-writings, and for me it just was not enjoyable enough.

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11/21/08

K.ty S rated it:

Read in November, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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12/09/08

Celia Bygraves rated it:

Read in December, 2008

This is less of a review and more of a footnote, but for the record I enjoyed the escapism of a bit of Sci fi, though it started with a lot more punch and some lovely descriptive and thought provoking scenario's, but was disappointed by the ending. Still worth the read and reminded my of Gibson's Necromancer initially, but wasn't able to keep up the momento, or really just threw the last few chapters away, it could have been so much more. It didn't leave you on the edge of your seat like it sh...more

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09/17/08

Tracey rated it:

bookshelves: libraryread

Read in September, 2008

Picked this up from the library as I very much enjoyed another Stross novel The Atrocity Archives. This novel has a very different feel, as it's Post-Singularity and more serious in tone. The world-building reminds me a bit of John Varley, FWIW.

I was very nearly about to give up on this, but Robin's -- the main character -- life is about to take what I hope is an interesting turn as he becomes part of an experiment to re-create early 21st century society. Other reviews mention t...more

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07/15/08

Jess rated it:

(review of isbn 0441015085)

bookshelves: sci-fi

recommended to Jess by: the internet
recommends it for: People who like sci-fi, mysteries, and sociological experiements

The first chapter of Glasshouse gave me an extreme case of time-shock. At its basic level, the beginning of the book is boy meets girl with a duel to the death thrown in for a little action. Except that this is the 27th century, so things are a bit more complicated if you are not familiar with the rampant body-swapping, the robotic killer wasp-viruses, the persona back-ups, and the memory-erasing that is fairly commonplace in the future.

Robin and Kay decide to take part in an experim...more

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04/11/08

Scott Radtke rated it:

bookshelves: sci-fi

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in May, 2008

Picture if you will... a man from the 27th century who's just had his memory erased in order to forget some very unpleasant things. Unfortunately, his previous self left a message informing said man that he's been targeted for assassination. In order to escape, he enrolls in a sociological experiment that places him in a closed community, meant to re-enact the "dark ages" of human history, circa 1950 - 2050, and in a woman's body. Glasshouse refers to the type of panopticon effect of c...more

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