Glasshouse (2006)

Glasshouse is a science fiction novel by British author Charles Stross, first published in 2006.

In 2007, Glasshouse won the Prometheus Award, as well as being nominated for the Hugo, Campbell, and Locus Awards.

Premise

The novel is set in the 27th century aboard a spacecraft adrift in interstellar space. Robin, the protagonist, has recently had his memory erased. He agrees to take part in an experiment, during which he is placed inside a model of a late 20th/early 21st century Euroamerican society. Robin is given a new identity and body, specifically that of a woman named "Reeve".

Major themes of this novel are identity, gender determinism, self-image, and conformity. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a sequel to his novel Accelerando (2005), although Stross has stated that the two novels are not obviously incompatible.

Production

Stross wrote of the book's production:

Glasshouse appeared, almost fully formed, in my head between 2:30 p.m. and 3:45 p.m. in the afternoon of 23 March 2003, while I was at the pub nattering with a friend. I held it off for all of two weeks or so, until 8 April, when the compulsion to start writing became too strong to resist, and the first draft emerged in just three weeks of obsessive 12-hour days.

Plot introduction

It is the 27th century, when technology has enabled humankind to inhabit the far reaches of the universe. The culture featured in the novel is based on the culture portrayed in the last chapter of Accelerando, "Survivor"

(full chapter here). Humanity has spread throughout the galaxy using the wormhole technology copied from the alien routers, forming a plethora of societies and 'polities'.

Robin, a human male, is recovering from a memory excision process in a rehabilitation centre. Though he remembers nothing of his past life or lives, he suspects that he lived through traumatic times as a participant in the series of wars that raged many years before. Suspecting that he has been targeted for assassination by persons unknown, he agrees to sign-up with a radical, isolated social experiment that will attempt to recreate the forgotten "Dark Ages", the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

On being transferred to the polity in which the program is being held, he discovers that he has been given the body of a woman, Reeve. As the experiment unfolds, she begins to suspect that all is not what it seems, and that the founders of the experiment are engaged in a very sinister conspiracy. Slowly, she realizes that her role is not as clear-cut as she originally thought, which leads her to question, and then struggle against the program.

Explanation of the novel's title

In the context of the novel, "glasshouse" refers to a military prison. The polity in which the bulk of the story takes place was formerly a high-security facility for war criminals. The term was first used to describe the glass-roofed military detention barracks based in Aldershot, UK, in the mid-19th century.

Stross also refers to the Glasshouse as a type of panopticon, a prison constructed in such a way that the guards in the center can see everything the prisoners are doing, but the prisoners can never tell if the guards are watching. Philosopher Michel Foucault used the model to represent the way humans tend to conform to and internalise societal ideals based on this kind of omnipresent gaze, an idea Stross exploits in the novel.

Background

Timekeeping

The polities descended from the Republic of Is do not use days, weeks, or other terrestrial dating systems other than for historical or archaeological purposes; however, the classical second has been retained as the basis of timekeeping.

Second : The time taken for light to travel 299,792,458 meters in vacuum.

Kilosecond : 16 minutes

Diurn 100 kiloseconds : 27 hours, 1 day and 3 hours

Megasecond (Cycle) 10 diurns : 11 days and 6 hours

M-year 30 megaseconds : 337 Earth days, 11 months

Gigasecond : approximately 31 Earth years

Terasecond : approximately 31,000 Earth years (half age of human species)

Petasecond : approximately 31,000,000 Earth years (half elapsed time since end of Cretaceous era)

Transport technology

T-gates : (Transporter gates). These are the ubiquitous point-to-point wormholes which link everything from polities that are light-years apart to rooms in habitats to each other. They are also used to enable one to access private storage spaces, even from clothing. Unlike the A-gates, traffic through these is instantaneous and unfiltered, though they can be fitted with firewalls at a variety of strengths.

A-gates : (Assembler gates). Nanotechnological arrays that can be used for creating all kinds of objects, goods, and substances very quickly, molecule by molecule, working from a wide series of templates. They are also used by the posthuman populace to create "backups" of themselves, redesign their physical bodies to whatever parameters they wish, long-distance travel between far-flung polities, and for medical purposes, making them, if they wish to be, virtually immortal. Military-grade versions exist which can be used to download polity-inbound traffic, analyse it for threats/contamination, reroute it to a DMZ, and then reassemble it if all is well.

Mobile Archive Suckers : Large spacecraft or mobile habitats which travel at slower-than-light speeds between the brown dwarf stars which most polities orbit. Self-contained and self-sufficient, fitted with their own A-gates, they are fuelled by plasma piped-in by T-gate from nearby stars. Generally, the ships' systems are not connected to the galactic network at large. Both crewmembers and passengers can, if they do not wish to experience the long subjective timescales of travel by this method, disassemble themselves in an A-gate and "sleep" throughout the journey.

Population centres

The vast majority of post-humanity lives in massive artificial cylindrical habitats, along with a few domed colonies on the planets, moons, and asteroids orbiting brown dwarf stars. These can be linked to each other by T-gates, creating a huge network of interconnected societies, known as the Republic of Is.