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    Glasshouse
    Glasshouse
    Glasshouse
    Audiobook13 hours

    Glasshouse

    Written by Charles Stross

    Narrated by Kevin R. Free

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross delivers "credible and bold SF" (Science Fiction Weekly) that continually pushes the boundaries of the genre. Glasshouse is a Kafkaesque tale in which a man, Robin, awakes in a clinic with severe memory loss. Finding himself targeted by a deadly opponent, Robin takes a calculated gamble and volunteers to be one of the subjects of an unusual study in the Glasshouse. But once there, he finds that the true terror has only begun. "One nightmarish panopticon."-New York Times
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 25, 2011
    ISBN9781449843717
    Glasshouse
    Author

    Charles Stross

    Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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    Reviews for Glasshouse

    4/5

    24 ratings20 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Charles Stross is one of the current writers of what I like to term “intelligent science fiction”. Following in the footsteps of icons such as Philip Dick and Frank Herbert, Stross demands the attention and concentration of his readers. If you let your mind wander for just a moment, you lose comprehension of the story. However, unlike “Saturn’s Children”, I found this novel somewhat more approachable and reader friendly.The setting is the far future. Individual consciousness has become largely transferrable and malleable, to the extent that beings can inhabit any number of bodily vessels and memories can be adjusted or even totally wiped in order to forge new beginnings. Our narrator in this tale has just undergone such a “memory wipe” and finds himself the target of assassins, for reasons unknown to him. Under these circumstances, he enrolls in a psychiatric experiment which he believes provides him safety from his pursuers. The experiment involves immersion into a controlled environment meant to simulate life in the first Dark Ages (1950-2040). You can imagine how some of our current (and recently past) customs and mores, especially in the realm of sexual politics, might appear to more highly advanced cultures.In any event, there are surprises in store for our narrator as he enters and becomes familiar with Glasshouse (the experimental polity). As I mentioned before, reading Stross is not akin to reading Asimov or Scalzi. There are layers upon layers of meaning in much of his writing, along with social commentary not usually associated with other science fiction writing, or handled in a far more subtle manner. Nevertheless, this novel is certainly approachable (though it takes a turn toward the confusing at about page 225), and can be enjoyed by virtually any fan of good, hard science fiction.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Charles Stross is an ideas man, and he's really in his element with Glasshouse. The character interactions are still weak, but the book was so well paced and so full of ideas that I did not notice.* Providing a standard time and identity authentication being the core roles of governments.* Weapons powered by wormholes leading to a secret star.* Weapons containing wormholes that open to release their payload instead of firing a bullet (i.e. radiation from a star).* Shutting down a botnet by severing enough links that the network exhausts its bandwidth keeping the network state intact.* Temporarily cordoning off memory by severing links, which reconnect at a predictable rate.* Encouraging/discouraging behavior with a points system shared with a group - participants moderate each other (and recognize that murder has a comparatively low cost).* Sex becoming a personal choice (reinforced by reversing the gender role of our protagonist).* Digitizing consciousness, allowing for "back ups" of people.* Multiple parallel copies of a personality that can have their state vectors merged.* Digital existence and widespread nano-assembly making everyone immortal, and changing the meaning of time. Stross reinforces this effectively with metric-second time relations (megasecond, kilosecond, etc) throughout the book.* Future society putting a large value on free information, and our generation becoming a "dark age" due to no information exchange standards, and incompatible and fallible storage mediums.* Future wars being fought over censorship.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Charlie Stross has been nothing if not prolific since bursting onto the SF novel scene a few years back. He’s usually heralded as a shining light of “new†hard SF, and held up as one of the ideas men driving the genre forward. In the past I’ve found his books good, but my main complaint has often been that while the ideas are good – and come thick and fast – they’re often hung around a relatively empty core of content.Based on that, I approached Glasshouse with mixed feelings. As is normal with Stross’ books, we’re in a future human setting, post a Singularity-type event (which Stross calls the Acceleration) where biology and cybernetics have become intertwined, smart AIs are the norm, and human individuals routinely download their memories, wipe out bad ones, edit others and save back-up copies of themselves in case of inconveniencies like death.The problem with Glasshouse is that too much of the book is occupied with an extended satire on late 20th Century morals and mores, which is not as clever, original or as amusing as Stross seems to think it is. The central character, in an attempt to escape assassins he believes are after him, volunteers to become part of a historical recreation project. Because of the rapid Acceleration, much of the historical information relating to exactly how pre-Acceleration cultures – our cultures essentially - worked has been lost. Now, researchers aim to investigate how it all worked by putting a handful of volunteers into a historical simalcrum and making them live as late 20th Century humans would have lived. To add to the immense hilarity, Stross has the male main character playing a female character in the simalcrum. Maybe it’s just me, but I found Stross’ satire tedious and dry, and kept waiting for the book to kick up a gear. It does attempt to – something, inevitably, is rotten with the set-up in the simalcrum – but even when it does, it never really manages to grip, and the plot twists are telegraphed so clumsily that they practically shout themselves from the moment the respective elements are introduced.The ending is oddly anti-climatic, and in the end the book is a damp squib. It’s technically all fine, and there are some brilliant ideas in it, both new ones - I loved the idea of the lead character having spent some time in his past as an entire pissed off tank regiment in a war – and continuations of old themes Stross has worked on, but it’s not enough to keep the interest level up.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I picked up the book based on the intriguing premise and was blown away by how good it was. Creative throughout, suspenseful, funny, and surprising.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I read this thinking Stross was going to be too complicated to follow - this is after all what many other people have said. I found this book a pleasurable, great read, an interesting social study. It really examines the characters thoroughly and you really get a sense of who they are. Since reading this I have tried some other books by Stross but was not as impressed as this one which I consider in the same league as Reynolds.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A wild, gender-bending cyberpunk ride! A deep, rich, thought-inducing world has been created here. Highly recommended.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Starts strongly as an interesting exploration of far future humanity in an era where you can choose your physical incarnation and death is pretty much banished. Then disappointingly segues into these post-humans living in a present-day virtuality. However, the book holds it together through very competent writing and by the end I was very engaged with the characters and story, even if they weren't what I was expecting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This book strongly reminded me of some of Bank's culture novels, where computer warfare and physical warfare are completely mixed. In Stross' civilization, like Bank's Culture, wormhole-like gates and replicators and 'backup' technology make travel trivial, and so is recovery from death. However, such long lifetimes make problems for people who do things they need to forget, which is the major theme of this novel. Interesting technology and psychology make this an interesting read, though it feels like he's trying to imitate Banks.
    • 4/5
      This is something like a thematic sequel to "Accelerando" being crossed with the intelligence procedural aspects of "The Atrocity Archives," all set in an apparent social dynamics experiment gone very wrong. Very tense. Very claustrophobic. Rather satirical in places, as Stross uses his setting to take his best jabs at current conservative social ideals.However, while I like this novel it's possibly not the best book to start with for someone wanting to try Stross. This is seeing as the main character Robin (a historian turned intelligence operative) is something of a victim turned sociopath, but not as charismatic as Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs. I should relate more than I do, but Stross's characters who are copies of copies tend to leave me cold.
    • 4/5
      This is a story with a few threads and quite a few twists and turns.It's rapidly apparent that there's the technology for memory editing (and backing yourself up), changing body shapes at will and so forth. There's also been a war recently.There are quite a few twists and turns, like when the lead characters get shoved (possibly by volunteering) into a pseudo-1950's society. The society is subtly wrong, at least to the eyes of the hero, but is that culture shock? (It's subtly wrong to my eyes too, but I never lived in small town USA in the 1950's.)There's some deep, thought-provoking writing about looking back at the past, identity and so forth, and a fun story too, especially if you like characters that don't know if they can trust themselves and their memories.
    • 5/5
      Nominated for the Hugo and deserving of the prize. This is one of the better science fiction stories that I have read in a long time.Set in the future, omnipresent atomic assemblers and point-to-point transporters have changed humanity itself. Stross fascinatingly explores the ramifications of this technology in the background of a amnesiac- spy- falls- in- love story. With a twist!
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting story about some people who agree to participate in an experimental polity, the glasshouse in a future that includes teleports for interstellar travel. Robin is fleeing from a ruthless pursuer and has to work at staying alive as well as trying to understand what the world he's in is all about.It's interesting but just not me.
    • 4/5
      It's nice to see Charlie Stross slowing down a little - Glasshouse seems to have more depth and character than the hundred ideas a minute of Accelerando or the Eschaton books. The only part which grated a little was the whole man-from-the-future-is-confused-by-our-upside-down world, but the rest was great.
    • 3/5
      First two thirds are fantastic. Incredible war scenes - horror, sick waste, black humour. And some great satire on 20th century.
    • 3/5
      Real Sci-Fi. Like nothing I’ve ever read before but the characters are real enough that I can empathize. Us humans always mucking up a good thing. Need dictionary at all times.
    • 2/5
      The setup of the story promises well, and the universe is thoroughly intriguing. Unfortunately, the story gets transmogrified into a fairly mundane suspense/mystery/detective yarn, with the only relevant science-fictional twist being used as a deus ex machina. Even worse, early in the work the protagonist asserts that it is important to synchronize personality threads to achieve a resolution. By the end of the story, this importance is completely left back in the dust.Not a bad story. The universe and technology would have given material for a lot better one, though. Stross has shown themself capable of producing a great story. Inevitably there will be ones that are not great. This seems to be one.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      I’m not sure if the characters in Glasshouse should be considered spirits, software or just a bunch of electrons. For purposes here, let’s just call them “people.”The novel contains a lot of the typical sci-fi trappings of barely thinkable technology, shape shifting and regeneration and resurrection. When you strip this all away, there’s actually an interesting story with a lot of social commentary.As part of a “historical” experiment, a group of people are placed in a microcosm where they have to live as if in the “dark ages” which happen to be a recreation of the ancient Urth years around 2000. (The novel uses an odd time system based only on seconds, so you read references to times like “gigaseconds ago.” Just ignore it; it’s not important to the story.) As participants, people gain and lose points for themselves and their team (cohort) based on how closely they act according to the socially acceptable practices of the times. This is where Stross gets to rip us apart and make us think of our value systems and what we hold important. For example, part of the story line is about an abusive husband that is raping and torturing his wife. There are no point penalties for either, however, others are afraid to interfere because there IS a penalty for “interrupting the sanctity of a marriage.” This situation is remedied by one of the characters in a bloody fashion.Other ideas addressed include mob psychology, peer pressure, gender roles and autocratic governments. Overall, I enjoyed the book but the end wasn’t very fulfilling. It seems that Stross just got bored and ended it as quickly as possible.
    • 4/5
      Complaints (with some SPOILERS):
      Stross's conception of the self strikes me as insufficiently psychosomatic. In Glasshouse, the "I" is software along for the ride in whatever hardware or wetware it finds itself. It might be copied poorly, disrupted by a virus, tweaked in certain ways, but there's still a fundamental self there, and that self is separable from bodies.

      It's not clear to me why the spreaders of the Curious Yellow virus should have selected a group of war criminals as the virus's new breeding stock. Anyone who, having the choice of billions to form a compliant polity, chooses several hundred professional killers deserves whatever they suffer.

      I'm already tired of the 'I'm the one [whatever] that can save the universe, if only I can figure out what's really happening' plot. Got this in Dune; in Kiln People; and now in Glass House. Hoping for something different, something more humble from the next sci-fi.

      That said, I had a lot of fun with this. Things blew up real nice. Its politics are liberal live-and-let live (which is to say, unradical and Fukuyaman, locating ideology 'out there' among the fanatics); its conception of suburbia a mixture of Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery' and Madeline l'Engle; and its choice to have several amnesiac, sexy war criminals as its heroes...weird.
    • 4/5
      Glasshouse is a post-singularity thriller in which the main character, Robin, freshly out of memory wiping surgery wakes to find that people are trying to kill him, and he doesn't remember why. To evade his pursuers, he elects to join a social experiment where twenty-seventh century post-acceleration people are recreating a city in the "dark ages" (our time). After entering the simulation and finding himself trapped inside, he starts to remember his past and discovers that there is a darker motive behind the experiment.Stross' experience working in IT is often evident in his work, and this novel is no exception. He tends to repurpose current ideas in technology and computers and imagine how they might influence humans after a technological singularity. This time, it takes the form of a sort of network civilization. Polities (sovereign political units) comprise many habitation units which are possibly, but probably not, colocated in real-space and which are connected to each other via trusted teleport gates. Teleport gates to other polities are go through demilitarized zones where people's signal streams are run through firewalls that detect subversive tendencies, viruses they might be carrying, etc.Identity is a significant issue in this book. In a society where people are regularly disassembled for teleport, backed up and restored upon their "death," copied multiple times and remerged, and wiped of their memories of previous "lives," concepts of body and gender are nearly nonexistent, while the idea what comprises the self is enlarged and held to be paramount. Murder is an minor crime, while identity theft and true destruction of a person (deleting all backups) are held to be the most heinous.