review: Glasshouse
So, it’s almost 2008! I’m still stranded out east waiting for a brief gap in the constant snowfall so I can drive home. Patience is strained, but holding. It’s been made more bearable by good reading and fine scotch.
Over the holidays, I read Charles Stross‘ Glasshouse and thoroughly enjoyed it. It continues to amaze me that Stross can write such interesting science fiction about acceleration and the singularity and that each can be so different. Glasshouse takes place around 700 years in the future in the “post-human” era. Humans have been through a singularity which happened sometime around 2050 and are able to modify themselves and store backups in case they die so they can be restored. It’s a bit similar to Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, in the sense that humans have become the product of their memories and the physical form is a mere shell. The comparison stops there, though as Stross’ post-humans have some other technologies which shape their universe and make it quite different and stranger than the noir earth of Altered Carbon.
Without spoiling too much, the book’s protagonist awakes from a memory wipe – a surgical procedure to erase painful or unwanted memories – as a near blank slate with a mysterious agenda. He emerges in a rehab facility for other patients of memory surgery somewhat guarded and fearful of some unseen threat. This serves as a bit of foreshadowing that something’s not quite right, or that there are some residual memories guiding him, or he’s a paranoid nut-case. We learn more about the threat later, and that unfolding turns out to be pretty interesting. It must have proved an interesting challenge as well, to write about someone with no real memories and how to give them the necessary context for what amounts to a mystery inside this futuristic, non-terrestrial “world”, er… space… whatever.
Eventually, our hero signs up for a simulation to escape the people who appear to be tracking him. The experiment takes place in a closed polity and will be sealed for three years once it’s started. The kicker is that the experiment is a simulation of “dark ages” society; pre-singularity humans living in an earth-like environment sometime between 1990 and 2010, i.e., “now”.
The trick Stross used to put us in the “dark ages” is since every bit of data we now create is encrypted (“for no apparent reason”) and locked away in proprietary formats, much of what we created was lost. Still more data was lost due to magnetic tape storage degradation. He has a funny way of putting it that comes across as “closed source killed our databarn” which made me chuckle. “Ironically, we know a lot more about their culture around the beginning of the dark age, around the old-style year 1950 than about the end of the dark age around 2040,” one of the experimenters explains to the group during their induction.
What ensues is a great bit of paranoia set in a parody of current-day society that is something like a mix of 1950’s sitcom living mixed with a massively multiplayer role-playing game with “zombie” sims. They’re governed by a point-system designed to encourage suitable behavior in people used to not having to do anything for themselves because their machinery, now unavailable to them, used to do it all for them. It’s funny and entertaining and needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong.
That’s enough spoilage. It’s an entertaining book that has some really interesting ideas packed into it. The future-version of “identity theft” is way worse than ours and replaces murder as the worst crime imaginable. I’m looking forward to reading Halting State in the near future.
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