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_pickle_'s review against another edition
2.0
If you're an author it's a good idea to put lots of effort into the first 90% of the book and just forget about the last 10%. I mean, it's not like endings matter, right?
tronella's review against another edition
4.0
A bit too graphically violent for my tastes, but very interesting.
thomcat's review against another edition
2.0
With mind uploading, matter duplication, and computer worms that infect the human brain, this is mostly space opera, right up to the convenient ending. The writing is rough and characterizations of women even worse, and it took far too long to read.
The universe of this stand alone novel seems to be familiar to the author, though I haven't read anything from it. As a standalone novel, it is rough going at times, and I had to reread sections to understand the bits of history provided under the assumption that they were relevant. The writing is uneven, and the main character uses the majority of opportunities letting us know she doesn't like being female. This is set in a future with new time units, but the author slips back into archaic units often. Perhaps an editor could help?
The novel had bits of humor, and references to popular culture, from Zimbardo and Milgram to Leonard Cohen to the Prisoner. These references aren't subtle, striking the reader like a hammer at inconvenient times. Be seeing you, indeed. 2 stars (out of 5).
The universe of this stand alone novel seems to be familiar to the author, though I haven't read anything from it. As a standalone novel, it is rough going at times, and I had to reread sections to understand the bits of history provided under the assumption that they were relevant. The writing is uneven, and the main character uses the majority of opportunities letting us know she doesn't like being female. This is set in a future with new time units, but the author slips back into archaic units often. Perhaps an editor could help?
The novel had bits of humor, and references to popular culture, from Zimbardo and Milgram to Leonard Cohen to the Prisoner. These references aren't subtle, striking the reader like a hammer at inconvenient times. Be seeing you, indeed. 2 stars (out of 5).
windchime79's review against another edition
4.0
Like the Laundry novels by the same author, this was a fast paced adventure with some dizzying twists and turns. It took me a little while to get into it - the far-future tech and world-building takes some getting used to - but once I did, I was very much hooked. Highly recommended sci-fi thriller.
adarossiwrites's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
neilfein's review
4.0
Where Accelerando was a study in Singularity futurist theory, Glasshouse, while taking place in the same society, concentrates more on getting you into the head of the protagonist, Robin, a veteran of the Censorship Wars. The reader gets to know Robin far more intimately than we did Manfred Maxc, even though Robin's memory has been severely redacted for much of for much of Glasshouse.
The themes of the universe as information and intellectual property are as strong as in the rest of Mr. Stross's work, but he works them into this novel with more subtlety. Although this isn't as gripping a story as The Atrocity Archives or Iron Sunrise, it's a worthwhile, enjoyable read and lives up to the author's deserved reputation.
The themes of the universe as information and intellectual property are as strong as in the rest of Mr. Stross's work, but he works them into this novel with more subtlety. Although this isn't as gripping a story as The Atrocity Archives or Iron Sunrise, it's a worthwhile, enjoyable read and lives up to the author's deserved reputation.
tachyondecay's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
What would you do if you could edit your memories—or more precisely, if others could edit your memories? This is one of the fundamental questions of Glasshouse, one of the earlier novels by Charles Stross. Still firmly within the posthuman stage of his oeuvre, this book is less about the implications of the existence of strong AI and more about the implications of mind uploading and an ability to alter physiology and neurology at an atomic level.
Robin has just undergone a radical neurosurgery that has excised most of his memories. Thanks to a letter from his past self, he has a vague sense of who he is, but no detailed memories of his family, profession, or anything from his past. He lives in a galaxy of loosely organized human polities fractured after a vicious “censorship war,” a post-scarcity world where you can be backed up by molecular (dis)assemblers, create duplicates of yourself in a bewildering variety of forms, and gate between star systems thanks to wormhole technology. In short: sufficiently advanced society, indistinguishable from magic.
Robin agrees to enter an immersive experiment designed to replicate a society lost to time—that is, ours. He finds himself in a female body, at the mercy of the experimenters who, of course, do not actually have his best interests at heart. It turns out Robin’s past self might have ulterior motives that he can only speculate at. Now assigned the identity of Reeve, she needs to get to the bottom of this experiment—without alerting the experimenters—and also hopefully locate the person she met prior to going into the experiment and with whom she might have been falling in love.
This is a strange novel, albeit perhaps not for the reasons one might think after reading my summary. Stross does a kind of bait and switch wherein he first leads the reader to believe that the threat to Robin/Reeve comes from without the experiment; in reality, and without spoiling it, the threat is as much from Reeve’s own uncertain mental state as anything else. In this way, Stross can explore several interesting ideas.
First is the extent to which embodiment affects identity. This has always been one of my favourite philosophical questions. Realizing I’m trans went a long way towards explaining my ambivalence towards embodiment in general (it was a lowkey manifestation of gender incongruence). We see a few examples of this in Glasshouse. Although Reeve is not opposed to being a female body, she is appalled by the primitiveness of an unaltered human body of any gender, the way she menstruates, is fertile, needs to work out in order to build muscle. Sam, on the other hand, is extremely uncomfortable with the male form because of negative associations from his past. And in general, all of them are uncomfortable with living in this ersatz representation of our contemporary society, simply because we lack the freedom to be whoever we want to be.
Second, and related, is the nature of autonomy and liberty. Reeve’s enemies want to unilaterally impose a new structure on society that is modelled after our own, with these enemies in charge. Now of course this sounds like a bad idea. But as Reeve points out at one point, the ability to edit memories introduces a wrinkle. If someone can edit your memory so that you remember having consented, even though you didn’t, does it matter that you didn’t consent? (Because as far as you remember, you did.) I know this is mind-bending stuff, but the end result is similar to the thesis of Dollhouse—namely, the ability to edit memory might be more dangerous than wielding physical weapons of mass destruction.
On a side note, I feel like if this novel were ten years younger Stross would have worked in connections to social media. While we aren’t quite capable of editing our memories yet, we are living in a golden age of misinformation thanks to social networks. With deepfake video, it’s possible to mislead even the most careful person these days. Two people can “remember” an event differenty thanks to exposure to misinformation, which can have very real consequences on our actions.
While the ideas are, as usual, high quality, I admit to some disappointment regarding the ending. After a lengthy build-up, the ending feels very rushed. The actual action is related in a confusing way, with a lot of things withheld from the reader (though easy to predict). I think I understand what Stross was trying to get at with the ending, as Robin and Kay attempt to build a new life together that allows them to escape the horrors of their past at war. Nevertheless, the execution left me wanting more than we are given.
So like a lot of posthuman science fiction, high marks for the big ideas but needs work on the implementation!
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Robin has just undergone a radical neurosurgery that has excised most of his memories. Thanks to a letter from his past self, he has a vague sense of who he is, but no detailed memories of his family, profession, or anything from his past. He lives in a galaxy of loosely organized human polities fractured after a vicious “censorship war,” a post-scarcity world where you can be backed up by molecular (dis)assemblers, create duplicates of yourself in a bewildering variety of forms, and gate between star systems thanks to wormhole technology. In short: sufficiently advanced society, indistinguishable from magic.
Robin agrees to enter an immersive experiment designed to replicate a society lost to time—that is, ours. He finds himself in a female body, at the mercy of the experimenters who, of course, do not actually have his best interests at heart. It turns out Robin’s past self might have ulterior motives that he can only speculate at. Now assigned the identity of Reeve, she needs to get to the bottom of this experiment—without alerting the experimenters—and also hopefully locate the person she met prior to going into the experiment and with whom she might have been falling in love.
This is a strange novel, albeit perhaps not for the reasons one might think after reading my summary. Stross does a kind of bait and switch wherein he first leads the reader to believe that the threat to Robin/Reeve comes from without the experiment; in reality, and without spoiling it, the threat is as much from Reeve’s own uncertain mental state as anything else. In this way, Stross can explore several interesting ideas.
First is the extent to which embodiment affects identity. This has always been one of my favourite philosophical questions. Realizing I’m trans went a long way towards explaining my ambivalence towards embodiment in general (it was a lowkey manifestation of gender incongruence). We see a few examples of this in Glasshouse. Although Reeve is not opposed to being a female body, she is appalled by the primitiveness of an unaltered human body of any gender, the way she menstruates, is fertile, needs to work out in order to build muscle. Sam, on the other hand, is extremely uncomfortable with the male form because of negative associations from his past. And in general, all of them are uncomfortable with living in this ersatz representation of our contemporary society, simply because we lack the freedom to be whoever we want to be.
Second, and related, is the nature of autonomy and liberty. Reeve’s enemies want to unilaterally impose a new structure on society that is modelled after our own, with these enemies in charge. Now of course this sounds like a bad idea. But as Reeve points out at one point, the ability to edit memories introduces a wrinkle. If someone can edit your memory so that you remember having consented, even though you didn’t, does it matter that you didn’t consent? (Because as far as you remember, you did.) I know this is mind-bending stuff, but the end result is similar to the thesis of Dollhouse—namely, the ability to edit memory might be more dangerous than wielding physical weapons of mass destruction.
On a side note, I feel like if this novel were ten years younger Stross would have worked in connections to social media. While we aren’t quite capable of editing our memories yet, we are living in a golden age of misinformation thanks to social networks. With deepfake video, it’s possible to mislead even the most careful person these days. Two people can “remember” an event differenty thanks to exposure to misinformation, which can have very real consequences on our actions.
While the ideas are, as usual, high quality, I admit to some disappointment regarding the ending. After a lengthy build-up, the ending feels very rushed. The actual action is related in a confusing way, with a lot of things withheld from the reader (though easy to predict). I think I understand what Stross was trying to get at with the ending, as Robin and Kay attempt to build a new life together that allows them to escape the horrors of their past at war. Nevertheless, the execution left me wanting more than we are given.
So like a lot of posthuman science fiction, high marks for the big ideas but needs work on the implementation!
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
steveab's review against another edition
4.0
I am now officially a Charles Stross fan.
A theme in this book helps explain why. What happens if you mix the "beam me up" thing from Star Trek with the notion in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash of viruses crossing over from life to technology and back? Stross gives some thought to how people would jump from one location to another without worrying about transportation, speed of light and so on. He's thinking quite a bit in the future, yet with a current decade Internet technology mentality. He imagines that people get "digitized," and like everything that gets digitized today, that means they are subject to cyber warfare, loss of internal integrity, and all the rest. Pretty crazy stuff, and yet, why not? As we move into an era of cyber warfare, uber-security everywhere.
That's part of the tech backdrop, which is heavy on the software infrastructure of the web and beyond.
For those for whom that is less of a draw, the real point of the book is a scary satirical send-up of 1950s suburban culture and gender roles, small town capitalism and large scale totalitarianism. Its kind of Mad Men through the high tech looking glass.
The book has tons of futuristic, nowish ideas about tech, politics, psychology.
Hope you'll try it out. Yup, its jargony, and you can just let it flow by as part of the mayhem.
A theme in this book helps explain why. What happens if you mix the "beam me up" thing from Star Trek with the notion in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash of viruses crossing over from life to technology and back? Stross gives some thought to how people would jump from one location to another without worrying about transportation, speed of light and so on. He's thinking quite a bit in the future, yet with a current decade Internet technology mentality. He imagines that people get "digitized," and like everything that gets digitized today, that means they are subject to cyber warfare, loss of internal integrity, and all the rest. Pretty crazy stuff, and yet, why not? As we move into an era of cyber warfare, uber-security everywhere.
That's part of the tech backdrop, which is heavy on the software infrastructure of the web and beyond.
For those for whom that is less of a draw, the real point of the book is a scary satirical send-up of 1950s suburban culture and gender roles, small town capitalism and large scale totalitarianism. Its kind of Mad Men through the high tech looking glass.
The book has tons of futuristic, nowish ideas about tech, politics, psychology.
Hope you'll try it out. Yup, its jargony, and you can just let it flow by as part of the mayhem.
imitira's review against another edition
4.0
I have, at the best of times, very little patience for viewing the present day through the eyes of an enlightened future dweller. It's a tired and pointless narrative device. Yes, I know today's world is silly and our cherished mores one technical advancement away from irrelevance. That's why I read science fiction.
Luckily, in this case, I had just enough patience to make it to the third act, at which point this book suddenly got interesting. The gender play is a little heavy-handed and awkward, and the psychology a little Stanfordesque but, buried underneath and slowly revealed, there's a reasonably good story.
Luckily, in this case, I had just enough patience to make it to the third act, at which point this book suddenly got interesting. The gender play is a little heavy-handed and awkward, and the psychology a little Stanfordesque but, buried underneath and slowly revealed, there's a reasonably good story.
curgoth's review against another edition
5.0
Audiobook re-read.
I didn't find this as mind-opening or insightful as I did the first time I read it. Some of that is that I'm older and have read more non-fiction feminism. This time around, I found the earlier parts of Reeve's time in the Glasshouse to be a tad off, though further on I decided that a fair bit of my concerns were addressed by the project messing with her mind when they put her in.
To an extent, it goes after contemporary gender ideas from an outsider's perspective like Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning, but doesn't push it nearly as far. It's more of a direct critique, especially in the beginning.
It also serves as an examination of "okay, but what could you *really* do with Star Trek's transporters?", which is the sort of thing I quite like.
My own reaction to the gender examinations in Glasshouse, in retrospect, remind me of reading The Handmaid's Tale in high school. There's the sudden understanding of the social privilege and physical power I have just by virtue of being born in reasonably healthy cismale body.
Which is where the first chunk of the Experiment feels off for me, now - Robin/Reeve's reactions to becoming cisfemale feel like what a contemporary cisman might feel to suddenly be in that body, and not what a posthuman used to building identities to order might feel. I have decided that there's subtext about this being the result of the Experiment's mental tinkering with the subjects, but I am unsure if that's deliberate on Stross' part or not.
I did still enjoy it, on this time through.
From an audio read perspective, Kevin R. Free does a fine job.
I didn't find this as mind-opening or insightful as I did the first time I read it. Some of that is that I'm older and have read more non-fiction feminism. This time around, I found the earlier parts of Reeve's time in the Glasshouse to be a tad off, though further on I decided that a fair bit of my concerns were addressed by the project messing with her mind when they put her in.
To an extent, it goes after contemporary gender ideas from an outsider's perspective like Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning, but doesn't push it nearly as far. It's more of a direct critique, especially in the beginning.
It also serves as an examination of "okay, but what could you *really* do with Star Trek's transporters?", which is the sort of thing I quite like.
My own reaction to the gender examinations in Glasshouse, in retrospect, remind me of reading The Handmaid's Tale in high school. There's the sudden understanding of the social privilege and physical power I have just by virtue of being born in reasonably healthy cismale body.
Which is where the first chunk of the Experiment feels off for me, now - Robin/Reeve's reactions to becoming cisfemale feel like what a contemporary cisman might feel to suddenly be in that body, and not what a posthuman used to building identities to order might feel. I have decided that there's subtext about this being the result of the Experiment's mental tinkering with the subjects, but I am unsure if that's deliberate on Stross' part or not.
I did still enjoy it, on this time through.
From an audio read perspective, Kevin R. Free does a fine job.