Glasshouse by Charles Stross

Glasshouse is Charles Stross’s latest look at the marvelous, strange, and often scary world beyond the singularity. It’s set in the same universe as Accelerando, though in this case it’s a novel telling a single story, not the series of shorts that made up the previous book. It’s a future in which humans are virtually immortal; they can be changed and restored by A-gates – essentially nano-assemblers that can rebuild them in any form, make backups, make copies, and so on. But this world of marvels has a dark side. The censorship wars were fought prior to the start of the current novel. In those wars, factions literally erases parts of history by removing them from the records – including the memories of people who used A-gates, which had become infected with a worm called Curious Yellow (usually just abbreviated as CY). The idea that the worms we see on our computer networks today could effect our minds in the future is a truly scary and unsettling concept, but that’s just the lead-in to this marvelously complex and nicely structured novel by Stross – perhaps his most ambitious to date.

As the novel starts, the main character Robin is returning to life, having just gotten a partial memory wipe to remove the memories of some of the things he did in the war. He doesn’t remember what he did, but he knows he was dangerous and knows there are some dangerous people after him. He volunteers to live in a Glasshouse (a former prison/rehabilitation center for war criminals), which is now being turned into a social experiment. In this experiment, earth’s dark ages (1950-2040) will be recreated. The volunteers will be limited to the technologies of the time, while they are observed by the scientists conducting the experiment.

But Robin (resurrected in the Glasshouse as a female named Reeve) soon realizes that things aren’t what he was promised. The society is the breeding ground for a dictatorship, where conformity is enforced, and where those who don’t conform are ostracized and can even be killed. Those in charge are war criminals, but since it’s a closed experiment, Robin and the others are trapped, with no way to get word to the outside world. Meanwhile, Robin is having flashbacks of his old life, of what he did during the war. And he’s getting inklings that his reasons for being here are more complex than he had though.

Stross does a great job of unraveling the joint mysteries of what’s going on in the Glasshouse and who Robin was and is. He reveals this bit by bit, giving us just what we need to know as we need to know it, thereby increasing the tension and mystery of the novel. Along the way he also reveals more and more of the history of his universe. He’s done a good job of working out a consistent and believable though very strange future (in fact, it’s impressive that he can make a future that is this strange seem believable).

The novel, given the setting, also of course has a lot to say about our current culture, as seen through the eyes of someone many hundreds of years beyond us (and in many ways farther beyond us than we are beyond the ancient Romans). He provides a satiric and insightful glimpse at the fifties, but also one that’s at time chilling (several scenes bring to mind the attitudes Miller explored in “The Crucible” or that Jackson examined in “The Lottery”).

I’ve liked pretty much everything I’ve read by Stross, but this is perhaps his best work yet. It’s ambitious and wonderfully constructed, the characters are well drawn (especially Robin), and the future worked out in detail. It comes to a satisfying conclusion, not demanding (though allowing for) more exploration of the worlds he created in the future. Choosing between this and Rainbows End for the Hugo will be hard (and I haven’t read Mike Flynn’s Eifelheim yet – it’s next on my list – which is also getting great reviews). Highly recommended.