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Glasshouse by Charles Stross
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Glasshouse (edition 2007)

by Charles Stross

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2,300766,733 (3.77)54
When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It's the 27th century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees' personalities and target historians. The civil war is over and Robin has been demobilized, but someone wants him out of the picture because of something his earlier self knew. On the run from a ruthless pursuer, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity, the Glasshouse, constructed to simulate a pre-accelerated culture. Participants are assigned anonymized identities: it looks like the ideal hiding place for a posthuman on the run. But in this escape-proof environment, Robin will undergo an even more radical change, placing him at the mercy of the experimenters--and the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche.--From publisher description.… (more)
Member:deTerrence
Title:Glasshouse
Authors:Charles Stross
Info:Ace (2007), Paperback, 352 pages
Collections:Your library
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Work Information

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

  1. 60
    Accelerando by Charles Stross (roundballnz)
  2. 20
    Neuromancer by William Gibson (gaialover)
    gaialover: The original cyberpunk.
  3. 00
    Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem (oldnick42)
    oldnick42: Creative sci-fi with memory-erasing elements.
  4. 00
    The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (ianturton)
    ianturton: A similar world of interchangeable bodies/minds
  5. 00
    The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert (paradoxosalpha)
    paradoxosalpha: far future espionage stories where the protagonist must infiltrate an experimental world in an effort to discover its true purpose, knowing only that there is some great culpability involved
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English (74)  Spanish (1)  German (1)  All languages (76)
Showing 1-5 of 74 (next | show all)
This is one of the most imaginative sci-fi stories I have encountered. Similar to Cory Doctorow, Stross knows no boundaries when it comes to imagining the future.

The book is about a 27th century war veteran named Robin, wearing a male body (it is common to back yourself up and change bodies as desired). To deal with his past in the war, he underwent memory surgery and is now not entirely sure who exactly he is. But he soon finds out that his former self volunteered to take part in a "glasshouse", a closed experimental research society set in the "Dark Ages" (late 20th century). This is were he wakes up - confused, disoriented, and stuck in the body of a frail woman, assigned the name Reeve.

This book is one of the rare ones which kept me reading non-stop. Reeve's descriptions of the dark ages are very amusing, and as the conspiracy around the glasshouse unfolds, the book gets ever more captivating. ( )
  adastra | Jan 15, 2024 |
I made it to p. 33 and that's all I could take. This seemed like it was going to be more of that worst of sci fi genres--guys having sex with female aliens. ( )
  lschiff | Sep 24, 2023 |
Extremely twisty ( )
  eleanorg | Feb 15, 2023 |
I found this while looking for science fiction stories about mind uploading and life extension. It's set in a world where people can rebuild their bodies basically at will; the main character is a (seemingly male) military operative forcibly remade into a 1950s American housewife as part of a bizarre social experiment. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's a very weird, very solid thriller, about escaping from prison—only the prison is society itself in a sense. Cool ideas, played with in interesting ways. This was my first Charles Stross novel, but I suspect it will not be my last.
1 vote Stevil2001 | Sep 2, 2022 |
hmm, on one hand, there are MUCH better send-ups of how 50s housewifery would look through alien eyes (I feel like the sufficiently advanced humans in this count as alien, if not truly extraterrestrial). On the other, I like the 'something else' I think the book is trying to do with the unreliable narrator - though. I haven't gone back and carefully re-read or looked up popular analysis to confirm.
In any case, there's a lot of interesting interesting psychology/philosophy of a high tech-future going on, but I still feel like poorly-done feminism has too much screen time, and distracts notably from the book as a whole ( )
  alspachc | Mar 25, 2022 |
Showing 1-5 of 74 (next | show all)
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Epigraph
"This apparatus," said the Officer, grasping a connecting rod and leaning against it, "is our previous Commandant's invention.... Have you heard of our previous Commandant? No? Well, I'm not claiming too much when I say that the organization of the entire penal colony is his work. We, his friends, already knew at the time of his death that the administration of the colony was so self-contained that even if his successor had a thousand new plans in mind he would nt be able to alter anything of the old plan, at least not for several years . . . It's a shame that you didn't know the old Commandant!"

-- "In the Penal Colony," Franz Kafka
Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?

-- Adolf Hitler, 1939
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For Ken MacLeod
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A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.
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When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It's the 27th century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees' personalities and target historians. The civil war is over and Robin has been demobilized, but someone wants him out of the picture because of something his earlier self knew. On the run from a ruthless pursuer, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity, the Glasshouse, constructed to simulate a pre-accelerated culture. Participants are assigned anonymized identities: it looks like the ideal hiding place for a posthuman on the run. But in this escape-proof environment, Robin will undergo an even more radical change, placing him at the mercy of the experimenters--and the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche.--From publisher description.

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