Glasshouse

Glasshouse
by Charles Stross
Recommended Ages: 16+

I'm not a big follower of pure science fiction, so take this for what it's worth, but I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to write a brief synopsis for this book. Most of the feats of world-building I've witnessed have been on the fantasy side of the sci-fi/fantasy divide, and maybe those are a little easier to reduce to a few bullet points. This book's vision of a possible future for mankind is so far-out and overwhelming in its conception that I almost don't know where to begin. But here's a try: suppose that mankind, sometime around 2040, develops a technology akin to the transporters on Star Trek, and that leads to what historians, many centuries farther along, will call the Acceleration. Those historians will also refer to the 90-year period that we're in the middle of as the First Dark Age; the second, on the far side of a great galactic civilization, will be associated with something called the Censorship War. And this story takes places in the aftermath of that.

So, transporters. Basically, they chew you up into your component molecules, store your mental and physical pattern in a computer file, and ideally, reconstitute you at the appropriate time and place, such as after a long interstellar trip or at the far end of a long-range transmission. But they can do oh, so much more than just disintegrate you and reconstitute you. They can also back you up and resurrect your last restore point if you get killed; they can repair injuries, reverse aging and cure diseases, making you virtually immortal. You can live thousands of lifetimes, changing your body type, your sex, your species, even putting your mind into a machine or a sort of sentient armor known as a Tank. You can have multiple instances of yourself running at the same time, and merge them back into one you. And apparently (lesson learned from the Censorship War), you can tamper with people's memories, their personalities, their beliefs, their identity. If you conceal it well, you can even infect the assembly gate network with a virus that will erase entire chapters of history (hence the dark ages) and create something for which you never realized there might ever be a name: a Cognitive Dictatorship.

I know, it's a mind-blowing concept; I mean, literally, it's about blowing people's minds. Falling victim to it is worse than death; inflicting it on people is worse than murder; and that's even true in a galaxy where death isn't necessarily the end. And the fight to end it is a brutal thing that requires certain people, like Robin, to commit certain acts, the likes of which one might not want to remember doing, later.

So. Robin (great name, right?) is recovering from memory surgery, in which he apparently rid himself of an entire lifetime of experiences that his old self could no longer live with. Having difficulty adjusting to a world in which he doesn't understand his place, he volunteers for a psycho-archeological experiment in which people like him, with nothing to lose, immerse themselves in a role-play scenario based on the pre-Acceleration dark age that you and I would call, more or less, now – or as close to it as the test designers can get. He wakes up a she, and is quickly established as the "weaker" half of a married couple in a dystopian past where women play an exaggeratedly passive role in home and social life. Even worse than that, the experiment uses a point system to establish a system of peer pressure that, at first, forces participants to conform to the designers' notion of 20th and 21st century social mores, but that quickly deteriorates into a fascist horror complete with informants and lynch mobs.

In the midst of it all, Robin – now Reeve – and her husband-by-chance, Sam, struggle to understand each other and their developing relationship. But at the same time, she is having flashbacks to her life before memory surgery, memories that her former self hid deep in her mind. She gradually realizes that she's a sleeper agent who has been planted in the experimental community to ... well, a synopsis is one thing; spoilers are another. You'll just have to read it. Let me rephrase: You just have to read it. It takes the future history of mankind in the weirdest direction I have ever seen it taken, which might not be saying much for the reasons I stated above; but it takes it there, and keeps going, beyond anything you would ever have expected or dreamed up. It thoroughly explores the possibilities of a world where transporter technology created a paradise, and that paradise was lost, falling as hard as the Garden of Eden; where our present day is a murky, prehistoric enigma; and where one couple's love story is tangled up in a crisis that threatens the future of humanity throughout the galaxy. It's also a book to which I am obliged to apply a bright red, pulsating Adult Content Advisory. For what it's worth.

This review is based on the audiobook read by Kevin R. Free, a voice actor who can audibly disappear into a wide variety of characters, including members of both sexes. There were times during this book when I frankly couldn't believe I was listening to just one person. Anyway, this is one of a small handful of standalone novels by Charles Stross, who is best known for his 12 "Laundry Files" novels and associated stories, his six-book "Merchant Princes" series, his "Singularity Sky" and "Empire Games" trilogies, the "Halting State" and "Freyaverse" duologies, and the short story collections Toast and Wireless.