Stross, Charles: Glasshouse

I wouldn’t have read Charles Stross’s Glasshouse if it hadn’t been nominated for a Hugo this year, as Singularity Sky didn’t really work for me and the premise of this one sounded painful. Somewhat like Singularity Sky, the premise wasn’t a problem in the way I thought, but I didn’t like the book for other reasons.

Glasshouse is set several hundred years in the future. Society is recovering from the censorship wars, in which someone or someones released worms to delete—something—from knowledge. (No-one remembers what, now.) Like society, the protagonist is also recovering from memory trouble: according to a letter he left himself, he extensively wiped his memory to escape some very bad enemies. Whom he, yes, no longer remembers.

To get even further away from these reported enemies, he agrees to join a sealed-off experiment, described by a passing infodumper as:

” [ . . . ] a complete polity—the briefing says there are over a hundred million cubic meters of accommodation space and a complete shortjump network inside. It’s not totally uncivilized, like a raw planetary biome or anything. There are a couple of catches, though. There are no free assemblers, you can’t simply request any structure you want. If you need food or clothing or tools or whatever, you’re supposed to use these special restricted fabricators that’ll only give you what you’re entitled to within the experiment. They run a money system and provide work, so you have to work and pay for what you consume; it’s intended to emulate a pre-Acceleration scarcity economy. Not too scarce, of course—they don’t want people starving. The other catch is, well, they assign you a new orthohuman body and a history to play-act with. During the experiment, you’re stuck in your assigned role. No netlink, no backups, no editing—if you hurt yourself, you have to wait for your body to repair itself. I mean, they didn’t have A-gates back before the Acceleration, did they? Billions of people lived there, it can’t be that bad, you just have to be prudent and take care not to mutilate yourself.”

“But what’s the experiment about?” I repeat. There’s something missing; I can’t quite put my finger on it . . .

“Well, it’s supposed to represent a dark ages society,” Linn explains. “We just live in it and follow the rules, and they watch us. Then it ends, and we leave. What more do you need?”

“What are the rules?” asks Kay.

“How should I know? [ . . . ] They’re just trying to reinvent a microcosm of the polymorphic society that’s ancestral to our own. A lot of our history comes out of the dark ages—it was when the Acceleration took hold—but we know so little about it. Maybe they think trying to understand how dark ages society worked will explain how we got where we are? Or something else. Something to do with the origins of the cognitive dictatorships and the early colonies.”

“But the rules—”

“They’re discretionary,” says Vhora. “To prod the subjects toward behaving in character, they get points for behaving in ways in keeping with what we know about dark ages society, and they lose points for behaving wildly out of character. Points are convertible into extra bonus money when the experiment ends. That’s all.”

(Unbracketed ellipsis in original.)

I thought, from a premise like this, that the book was going to be satire, and I’m allergic to satire. Whatever it was intended to be, I don’t think it works as satire, because life inside the experiment turns out to be all too easily and obviously bad, in an very low-hanging fruit manner. (Yup. 1950s-style gender roles suck. Next?)

What is a problem with the premise, is discernable from that excerpt. In a post-scarcity society, why would anyone enter “a dark ages panopticon theme hotel” (as the protagonist thinks, after doing just that!) for money?

(I will note that I didn’t realize this until I was done, because the book does have good pacing that pulled me along. But this was one of those works where once I started thinking about it, the more problems I found, and the less I liked it. More on this anon.)

What most of this ends up feeling like, to me, is that things happen because The Author Said So. Not just why anyone not-Robin would join; I suspect that the basic implementation of the experiment, and thus the whole story, is an idiot plot. And the actions of the characters inside the experiment, well, L. Timmel Duchamp writes thoughtfully and at length about the resulting gender and class problems in a Strange Horizons review (somewhat spoilery). I noted these issues when reading, but I’m frustrated for a different reason: I’d like to analyze it all seriously, but I just can’t bring myself to, because it feels like there’s nothing there. My answer to “what does it mean that the characters are acting like this” is, “it means that The Author Said So in order to make this set of events happen,” and that’s just not very interesting. Or satisfying.

(If pressed, I would guess that the book is working from the premise that gender is purely a social construct, but that there are serious problems in the execution, as identified by Duchamp.)

But in my attempt to be a responsible reviewer and say up front what the book’s about, I’ve actually come at this backwards. As I said, the book does have strong pacing, and while I wasn’t thoroughly sucked in by Robin’s narration, I did want to find out why Robin’s memory was wiped and what was going on with the experiment. So I read, not enjoying the more claustrophobic paranoid Stanford Prison Experiment parts, but I had interest and momentum and was enjoying it more than I’d expected.

Until I hit the brick wall that was the ending.

All I can say without spoilers is that I thought it a poor thing to do to the reader, and possibly to the character involved as well; I’d be more sure if I thought I understood why the character acted that way. I don’t, but when I was trying, I started thinking about other things . . . and here I am, having realized that I really didn’t like this book. (I know, you’re all shocked.)

(Very big ROT-13 spoilers (though a bit oblique): qrne puneyrf fgebff, lbh ner ab thl tnievry xnl. naq rira ur unf n uneq gvzr chyyvat gung gevpx bss.)

Other people might have a problem with the scope of the ending, which I understand though don’t share, as I think it fits thematically. Even aside from the brick wall, though, I did find the ending a bit flat and rushed, because of the limitations of point-of-view (which are oddly artificial, here, now that I think about it).

If memory, identity, and the construction and recognition thereof are your failsafe interests, by all means read this. And lots of other people think highly of it, and you may well find your tastes are closer to theirs than mine. *waves YMMV flag* (If you try it, stick it out past the first couple of chapters, which I found hard going. Either the density of information drops thereafter, or I got used to it.) But I think everyone would be happier if I didn’t read any more of Stross’s books from now on, even if they’re nominated for awards.