GLASSHOUSE by CHARLES STROSS

Orbit paperback, 400pp, £6.99

Reviewed by David McWilliam

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WARNING: THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CAN BE CONSIDERED TO CONTAIN SPOILERSLet me begin by stating that Charles Stross’s Glasshouse is a text where ideas take centre stage. This is not an indictment of his plotting or characterisation, both of which are handled assuredly throughout, but an indication of the breadth of imagination on display in a novel which is simultaneously a cyberpunk thriller and a complex moral satire - of both our own “dark age” and the text’s fragmented posthuman narrator.

Before the first syllable of the opening chapter, Stross includes a note that signals his intent to create an immersive and well thought-out distant future, by detailing the new method of time keeping used within “the polities descended from the Republic of Is”. This is followed by a sharp twist of tone and register in the text’s opening passages, with an introductory encounter in a bar between Glasshouse’s central character and narrator, Robin, who has just left memory surgery, and a female patron, Kay, a former patient who is assigned to assist with the rehabilitation of post-ops.

The ensuing conversation is a barely concealed device to allow the insertion of intensive passages of exposition to help orientate readers in this bewildering society of posthumans, who seem to possess few similarities to the inhabitants of the world as we currently know it. Not only do we learn about the polities that make up the human civilisation, isolated habitats linked throughout the universe by a series of teleporters (”T-gates”), but also of Robin’s aggressive and mistrustful personality, as he breaks from the conversation to duel another soul freshly messed up by the excision of her memories. Stross’s deployment of a first person narratorial voice throughout the text gives readers an intensely subjective perspective on the events that unfurl within the plot, as Robin assesses each new situation and encounter through an obfuscating veil of his own doubts and neuroses.

The back of my Orbit edition of Glasshouse describes the novel’s protagonist as “a posthuman on the run”. As a “posthuman” Robin has undergone memory surgery several times, meaning that there are layers of personality and past deeds constituting his history that have been surgically removed, hidden or obscured by a surgeon-confessor with the consent of his past selves. The seeming lack of rights of the individual to protect against their former personalities’ whims is alluded to in the early part of the story, but becomes a more central theme as the text develops.

Later, it transpires that Robin has lived for several times the current lifespan of a human being, held several different identities and even been reconfigured in an assembler (or “A-Gate”) to become a “tank”, or biomechanical warrior. The novel is structured in such a way as to lead the reader to believe that Robin is seeking to forget the person he was in an effort to start a new life for himself, with would-be assassins forcing him to seek refuge in the secretive experiment taking place in a former prison, known as the Glasshouse.

This experiment is ostensibly a historical exercise, an attempt to recreate the late twentieth century after memory and record of it were destroyed by a viral infection, Curious Yellow, in the A-Gates by which the posthumans maintain their virtual immortality through backing up their consciousness and physical form. Curious Yellow had been unleashed into this A-Gate system as a means of dividing an intergalactic empire, thus allowing autonomous dictatorships to emerge within the polities through bloody coups. The virus was eventually destroyed and many of the oppressive regimes were overthrown, but mankind has become mistrustful and the T-Gates of each polity remain guarded.

The experimental applicants are told that they must adhere to what the organisers have deemed historically authentic behavioural patterns, including unprotected sex with one’s partner, which will be judged against a score system whereby groups can gain or lose points. The group with the most points at the end of the experiment will be financially rewarded. Each subject within the Glasshouse is assigned a body, name and partner and must then use the guidelines to mould an identity that belongs in the time period they are recreating. Having been signed up to the project by a previous incarnation of himself, Robin wakes within the Glasshouse as a woman named Reeve and is assigned a husband, Sam, an even more troubled member of the experiment.

The experimenters’ encouragement of divisions between those who embrace the score system and those who struggle to accept its pressures soon hints at a sinister plot aimed at repopulation through strict patriarchal order, provoking the lynching of an adulterous couple and the rape of a woman whose husband seeks to improve his score by making her conceive. These acts alienate Robin/Reeve, whose excised memories of his former lives start to bleed back into his consciousness, reminding him that he once fought against thought control as a tank in the war against Curious Yellow. As the plot develops in the Glasshouse it soon becomes clear that there is far more at stake than the fate of those inside it, with hints that they may actually be the device by which the universe is thrown back once more into violent warfare.

The score system by which the subjects of the experiment are judged successful provides a dark satire of our own world, making public what is effectively an unspoken consensus within society - to pressure those around you into conforming to a set morality that is applicable to all. The way in which this patriarchal system is represented suggests that the template for the social structure in the Glasshouse is early-mid twentieth century Western culture, as the performative aspects of gender, such as employment, dress code and social status, are far more clearly delineated than in the present day.

The distress Robin feels - as Reeve - by being contained in a body which is written upon by the gaze of others, rather than malleable to his will, highlights the lack of freedom such a society brings to those who are disempowered by its system of privileges. Sam provides a useful counterpoint as a male, feeling constrained by the unfairness of the rules towards an individual he cares for, deferring to Robin as a leader and foregoing the position he holds within the Glasshouse.

This exploration of gender is troubled by the fact that Robin, despite being a posthuman whose consciousness controls his physical form, sees himself as gendered male, Reeve’s form making him feel “trapped in a wholly inadequate body, with only patchy memories of whoever I used to be left to prod me along”. Indeed, I have referred to him using masculine pronouns throughout this review, as the representation of his personality is persistently masculine in tone. Contrast this with Sam, whom we find out was a female before being signed up, utterly unhappy to be in male form, and you have gendered posthuman characters.

The text does explain this dependence upon a gendered self in the histories of both characters. However, the obvious critique of biological essentialism that such a posthuman should provide when forced into a twentieth century human form remains ambiguous. Furthermore, the inaccuracies of the Glasshouse experiment’s recreation of “dark age” society seem to suggest that the text is far more complex than a satire of the present day from the vantage point of the future. For, as readers, Glasshouse encourages us to return the narrator’s gaze and scrutinize Robin and his culture.

I have read criticisms of Glasshouse based upon the lack of intelligible motivations for the behaviour of the posthuman subjects within the experiment, as their previous lives seemed to require no bonuses for enjoyment or satisfaction. The fear of death has been removed by access to the A-gates, and the need for money, shown within the text as the incentive for murder, rape and loss of posthuman rights, being invalidated by the prevalence of the A-gates and seeming lack of capitalist economy. This pattern of behaviour does seem nonsensical to contemporary readers, but could perhaps be seen as the moral bankruptcy of the posthuman condition gone wrong.

In her text How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles states “my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognises and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being”. It is this very sense of finitude which is absent in the posthuman condition presented in Glasshouse. As the posthumans can sell their backups into experiments, kill people to relieve their own tensions in mortal duels, change their physical form and identities, as well as manipulate their existences in any way they can imagine, they are stripped of a respect for life that is derived from the condition of mortality.

Robin’s violence in the first chapter shows that the world of the posthumans is as prone to social disorder as our own world. As the text progresses, his intense memory excision, used to make him a sleeper agent, suggests that Robin’s consciousness is so open to manipulation, both by his past selves and the surgeon-confessors, that any sense of freedom or autonomy is questionable. His sense of himself as gendered male could be seen as an attempt to impose a sense of finitude on an existence otherwise characterised by unlimited possibilities.

Their interface with technology has taken away a sense of danger, leaving Robin’s society open to exploitation for the sake of financial gain (however that may be used within their culture), which appeals to the sense of competition of bored immortals, or provides a place of refuge for those who have lost a sense of self through excessive manipulation of consciousness and identity. In the Glasshouse, the posthumans are separated from the technology of the A-gates, but for some the callous attitude towards pain that can be erased - and death that can be reversed - persists.

It is perhaps more of a window into the minds of these immortal posthumans than a failure of Stross’s world creation that they accept the Glasshouse experiment as a viable structure, and that it is characters such as Jen who incite the lynching, rather than part of the experimenters’ plans. For this reason, I see Glasshouse as a thought-provoking meditation on morality, less focused on where we are today than on what we could one day become.

Glasshouse attempts much in its three hundred and eighty-eight pages and succeeds on almost all levels. My only reservation is that the ending, having been built up to so well, seems slightly rushed, spoiling the pacing in the last sixty or so pages with exposition and action following one another at a completely altered pace to what preceded. That said, the ending provides closure to the main narrative arc within the text, and does tie together many disparate threads. Managing to cram so many ideas into a text whilst remaining so coherent and readable, exciting and well crafted, makes Glasshouse well worth investigating for fans of cyberpunk who are looking for something with both style and substance.

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David McWilliam was born in Liverpool in 1982. He graduated in 2006 with BA Honours in English Literature from the University of Sheffield, where he specialised in literature of the fantastic and speculative fiction and wrote a dissertation on a Foucauldian reading of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle in relation to the nature of subjecthood. He is currently living and working in South Derbyshire and writing wherever possible.

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