Glasshouse

The time is hundreds of years into the post-human future. Our present era is one of the "dark ages," cloaked in mystery because data preservations techniques were changing so much between 1950 and 2050 that nothing of value was stored in a durable media. Society is dependant on "A-Gates" that can assemble anything through nanotechnology and "T-Gates" that can take anything anywhere through wormholes. No one dies permanently anymore because personality and memories can be stored and recreated.Robin is recovering from a self-prescribed memory wipe surgery. He takes up with the four-armed Kay. He is being threatened by something in his forgotten past. They decide to enter an experiment that will cut them off from the universe for one-hundred "megasecs," which is about three years.Once in the experiment, Robin finds himself in a puny female body and he can't identify Kay. He also discovers that the experiment has reproduced a society that incorporates the gender rules of the 1950s and the experimenters have rigged a punishment and reward scoring system to enforce the rules.I found the first half of the book tiring and irritating. Basically, it seemed to be an opportunity for satirizing gender roles based on a strawman caricature. Worse, the previously male Robin seemed to be stereotypically female, acting in ways that wouldn't seem to be typical of a male or even a person where gender roles had been eliminated by gender-swapping technology. Likewise, the other former denizens of post-human society seemed to become something like high school girls. It seemed weird and not very persuasive.On the other hand, at some point, the book shifted into high gear as a high-tech spy thriller. We learned a lot about how the paradise of post-human high technology is actually very capable of dehumanized horror. These aspects of the story were what sold the book to me, raising my score from three stars to four stars.Ultimately, after a choppy start, I enjoyed this book's energy and vision.

Memory and identity in the post human era. In short very complicated. Imagine universal fabricators, control of space and time ( wormhole gates ) and potential control of minds as easily as software is controlled now. Copied. Split. Hacked. Subverted. Penetrated with viruses. Before long you wouldn’t know who was who or why. Body and gender just an afterthought easily changed. What foul deeds and anguished monstrosities would arise. All fighting it out in the glass house, a sim of our own - or slightly earlier - deceptively simple and placid times. As always expertly written and quite engaging. Thought provoking.

Set in a future where Humanity has achieved replicator/transporter level technology, our sword wielding, bad-ass main character has just taken a complete memory erasure and a new body.Looking to lay low from whatever demons they've left in their past, our hero signs up for a three year anthropology experiment simulating late 20th century culture which almost immediately goes horribly wrong.All of this sets up a somewhat contrived, but delightful excuse to thoroughly savage 20th century social norms. I could pick nits with some of the characters and plot holes and you might find them distracting, but I was having too much fun to care.

Charles Stross's extremely clever, if extremely loopy, "Glasshouse" imagines a far future of travel by teleportation (through assembler gates--wait for it), body alterations, physical backups, and a worm that reprograms people's memories.The hero is (a male) named Robin who's just gone through memory erasure (perhaps voluntarily). In order to avoid what he believes are assassins pursuing him, he volunteers for an experiment in which people live as they did during the "dark ages." Although the dark ages in question are the 20th and 21st centuries.Stross has a clever idea: the records from the earlier part of the period, when paper and ink was still the primary method of data storage, will have proved more durable than electronic storage, in which data has been lost due to the constant procession of different, competing storage devices. Anyhow, the world Robin (now a female named Reeve) finds (her)self in has late-20th/early 21st-century tech (mobile phones, microwaves), but a social structure from the period of 50 years before, with men going to work and women staying home.Robin/Reeve, however, quickly discovers that the danger to (her)self lies precisely within the parameters of the experiment, and not with assassins without. Of course, she tries to do something about this, and the thrills start.The book's a kick, with wild speculations, hat-tips to Franz Kafka, Alice Sheldon, Paul A. Linebarger, the old "The Prisoner" tv miniseries, and the computer worm that's featured so prominently in the book is named Curious Yellow. But maybe Mr. Stross isn't quite as clever as he thinks he is; sometimes the breathless first-person present-tense narration by Robin/Reeve devolves into cute or technobabble. And the ending feels rushed. But it will sustain your interest over the course of its 333 cramped pages packed with too-small print. (You'll need to visit your opthalmologist when you finally put the book aside.) Some publishers have been improving the look and feel of their small-size paperbacks. This publisher has not joined the party.

This is a good thriller. The plot makes sense, nobody is carrying the Idiot Ball, its well written and the characters are believable. I really got involved in the book, to the point that it was difficult to get my mind back to reality while reading it.But what made this really stand out for me was the thorough exploration of what Star Trek transporters really mean. There is an old riddle about ST transporters: do they actually transport you, or do they kill you and then re-incarnate you somewhere else?Glasshouse has both kinds: "T-gates" are actual portals from one point in space to another. "A-gates" are nano-tech assemblers / disassemblers. You sit in one; you are rendered unconscious, nanobots disassemble you while recording the exact location of each atom, and you are then reconstituted from that information.You can be reconstituted somewhere else; that's the transporter part. Or you can be recreated from a backup if you die, or just duplicated as many times as you like. Or you can have yourself edited. Fancy a second pair of arms, or just swapping sex? What kind of body do you want to wear *today*? Of course having duplicated yourself you want to have the experiences of your alter-ego, so you have both versions sit in an A-gate and then "merge the diffs".Stross not only has this all worked out, he has created a plausible world built around this technology with a traumatic history and a collection characters with flaws and motivations driven by their various pasts. He then uses all of this to create a tense well-plotted thriller.Overall; science fiction at its finest.

I have read a lot of Stross and Glasshouse is my new favourite.Trapped in a military prison orbiting a brown dwarf, cut off from the rest of an advanced civilisation after a war with a virus called Curious Yellow that edits the memories of those it infects, the inmates are involved in an experiment to recreate the dark ages between 1950 and 2050.Totally awesome. =)

An interesting novel about an ex soldier from the far future who has had 'surgery' to erase his memories and then discovers that his previous enemies are still after him so he signs up for a closed experiment.It's loads of fun, rather complicated and I'd have liked to know far more about the original society our hero lives in before we jump to the closed society of the experiment.--------------------------------------And now, having read Accelerando, I now know what an awful lot of the unexplained stuff is all about.

Stross has an excellent manner in his storytelling. Throughout Glasshouse I found myself constantly wanting to know more. Every time new information is given other mysteries surface. It's a bold approach but one that pays off as the intrigue keeps you glued to the pages. By the conclusion of the story you'll find everything fitting into place perfectly, you'll find the characters engaging and worthy of empathy but most of all you'll find a satisfying conclusion to a well told science fiction story.

Bit confusing at first - but it all comes clear.Mind you it was confusing for the story hero - so that makes it more real.Interesting concept - I liked it - the memory wipe concept reminded me of Arnie in Total Re-call, but thats as far as the similarity goes.Interesting developments flow into the story regularly and it made a good and enjoyable read.Read on the Kindle Paperwhite in complete darkness!(Cos it can do this - we have the technology)