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A review by songwind
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
4.0
Glasshouse is an excellent novel about a future where identity is fluid, and your whole life can be backed up on a computer.
What kind of society do you get where people are taken apart and scanned into a computer, then transmitted over FTL links because it's easier than actually moving the mass?
What kind of society do you get when death just means reverting to backup? And what happens when you can request that your restore change hair color, skin color, sex, or even species?
What would happen to that society when a war is fought with computer viruses?
And what would happen to those people if they were forced into a single, unchangeable form and forced to live according to a historian's concept of the 20th century?
What kind of society do you get where people are taken apart and scanned into a computer, then transmitted over FTL links because it's easier than actually moving the mass?
What kind of society do you get when death just means reverting to backup? And what happens when you can request that your restore change hair color, skin color, sex, or even species?
What would happen to that society when a war is fought with computer viruses?
And what would happen to those people if they were forced into a single, unchangeable form and forced to live according to a historian's concept of the 20th century?