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A review by steveab
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
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.