Glasshouse
by Charles Stross
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Book Summary Information
Author: Charles StrossEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-06-26
ISBN: 0441015085
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Ace
Book Reviews of Glasshouse
Book Review: Fantastic science fiction novel enjoyable on several levels
Summary: 5 Stars
In the 27th century there are worse things than murder. In fact, killing someone is often no big deal at all. Thanks to devices call A-gates, a person can come back from the dead an infinite numbers of times, even modify how they come back (or modify themselves while still alive). Want to change genders? No problem, step right inside, only takes a few kiloseconds (yeah, in the future you have metric time to look forward to). Maybe you would like to be stronger, or faster, or younger, or for whatever reason, look older? No problem. Or maybe have four arms or even look like a centaur? Hey, anything is possible in the future. You can cheat age, disease, in fact, never need die ever. Dueling is even legal, as no one dies permanently (although it is bad form not to ask permission).
However, one can still do horrible things in the distant future. If a person is killed and that person's backup copies were erased from all computers, well, that is a heinous crime. Or if someone tampers with a person's memories, changes a few things, adds a few things, maybe deletes something they want kept hidden, that is a terrible crime. While people can and do choose to have procedures done on their memories, perhaps deleting or attenuating the memories of a painful personal loss or relationship gone sour, or just trying to recapture the mental vitality of a youth long ago, wars have been fought in the past over the crime of forcible memory alteration and deletion.
The protagonist of the book _Glasshouse_ by Charles Stross, a man by the name of Robin, thinks he may be a victim of just such a crime. In the opening chapters of the book, he wakes up, freshly restored in a new body. Left only with a curiously incomplete letter he apparently had written to himself before he had much of his memory wiped, he is at a complete loss as to why he had his memory wiped, whether or not it was voluntary, what he lost, even what he did for a living before it happened. Finding himself convalescing in a hospital with other recent memory alteration and excision patients, he finds he has fleeting memories of his life before and surprising talents of self-defense. Is he hiding from assassins? Has someone wiped his mind of something and is now watching to see if the mind-wipe was successful?
Falling for a woman he met while recuperating and seeking to hide from assassins he believes on his trail, Robin agrees to a bizarre experiment. For three years, he has agreed to immerse himself (along with his new girlfriend, who suggested the idea) into a self-contained habitat built to mimic the late 20th century, a new polity (something like a nation-state) that has no contact with the outside world (other than what the experimenters allow) and all of its inhabitants will have to live, work, and play in a world not unlike that of the readers. Lured by a large payoff at the end of the experiment and a belief that no assassins can reach him while he recuperates and puzzles together the tantalizing pieces of memory of his distant life that have started bubbling to the surface, Robin agrees.
Before he knows it, Robin wakes up in that new polity. Unsure of how he got there that fast and his memory shaky of actually signing any agreement, he comes to in temporary quarters in the experiment. As a woman. In shock, dismayed to find he has very little upper body strength, has to wear complicated period piece clothing he has to read instructions on how to use, he is ushered together with other recruits from his "cohort" and given mere minutes to pick a "husband" to pair off with and live with in the polity for three years.
His or rather her new name is Reeve according to her dossier, and as the experiment is geared to pay off bonuses to reward behavior (basically acting in character for the time period) and penalties to punish (such as talking about your past life), Robin-now-Reeve has a myriad of problems. Can she find Kay, the woman she joined up with? Are their assassins with her in the experiment, and if so, how can she identify them (everyone has switched bodies) and fight or avoid them (her new body is unsuited to her gradually reappearing martial skills and she lacks access to any weaponry other than what she might be able to make)?
A very entertaining story, it had many enjoyable elements. I loved the stranger in a strange land aspect of Reeve's early days in the experiment, puzzling out neckties (why do men wear silk scarves for?), physical books (they read carbon ink on macerated wood pulp made from actual trees!), washing clothes (clothing is apparently not self cleaning and has to actually be immersed in water!), natural fabrics (after reading about silk -what she called bug vomit - she got queasy and resolved to only wear artificial fabrics thank you very much), Reeve felt lost and estranged from the life she knew, railing against "irrational laws and meaningless customs." I also enjoyed the conspiratorial aspects, as she fought at first visibly and then in secret society's conventions for women, not (only) out of a sense of outrage, but just so she wouldn't be vulnerable against her enemies, secretly strength-training and building crude medieval weaponry while investigating when she could, coming upon some very dark secrets indeed about the experiment, hoping not to be tied down by the "score whores", a coterie of women obsessed with making sure everyone in their cohort is following societal conventions in order to sure a big payoff at the end of the experiment. Also there was a romantic aspect with Sam, her pseudo husband. At first a complete stranger, she comes to know Sam, then depend upon him, all while worrying about who he really was.
Summary of Glasshouse
In the twenty-seventh century, accelerated technology dictates the memories and personalities of people. With most of his own memories deleted, Robin enters The Glasshouse-an experimental polity where he finds himself at the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche.
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