Set centuries after the events of his amazing novel Accelerando, Charlie Stross’s Glasshouse is an attempt to deal with the issues of identity and self when technology has divorced the essence of individuality from any specific physical form. The Singularity of that story is so far in the past that individuals who remain recognizably human have chosen to forgo the option of ascending to that higher plane of existence, for the most part, and thus remain emotionally understandable to us.
Stross is, for my money, one of the stronger writers assessing the impact of technological trends, as illustrated by a recent talk he gave to a corporate audience. In this novel he posits that one’s mentality (for lack of a better, non-spiritual term) can move between nearly any imaginable type of body or other processor-capable object (humanish or not, of either gender or none at all), be copied and simultaneously occupy many different objects and then re-merge those instances back into one or be scanned and instantaneously shipped to a distant star system through a wormhole and re-instantiated in physical form; further, sophisticated surgeon-confessors are able to deftly excise specific memories. In such a context, how does one answer the question “Who are you?”
Robin/Reeve, our protagonist, has done a lot of living in the more than 200 years (or seven or eight gigasecs, since this star-spanning culture measures time in large groups of seconds rather than days, months or years) since being born. Most recently he was a soldier for an army battling an unknown but omnipresent enemy that used a computer worm called Curious Yellow to corrupt the network of gates that underlie the galactic polity and destroy the single, uber-Libertarian minimalist government that organized human space. For most of his enlistment Robin was a battalion of tanks (see the previous paragraph) but reverted to orthohuman form (what you and I think of as normal) and joined the intelligence group just before his side won.
What did winning mean, though? The perpetrators of the worm were unknown and remained so to a large degree even after defeat. The Linebarger Cats, Robin’s army, won by capturing or destroying a significant majority of the infected gates, replacing them and shipping every human through the clean ones. But the worm was, as you’d expect, quite capable of forcing the infected people to fight on its behalf so the war was extremely bloody and traumatic. Robin, even after memory surgery to remove the worst of it, is still in need of therapy to recover and signs up to participate in an experimental polity that offers hope of just that.
He wakes up ‘inside’ as Reeve, a petite female, having undergone further surgery that deleted his memory of choosing to switch genders and deciding to go in to a Truman-show like recreation of the late 20th Century. And she is not very happy, especially when her cohort of ten new citizens are told to divide up–immediately–into male/female pairs. Leaving things until a bit late, her choice of mates is reduced to a quiet man called Sam.
You see, the years from 1950 through 2040 are (at the time of Glasshouse) considered a dark age, dark in the sense that very little knowledge remains of the period when humanity went from the steam engine to the Singlarity. Records were lost due to inefficient, incompatible storage mechanisms and so society’s understanding of its formation has vanished. Three scholars, Doctors Yourdon, Fiore and Hanta, have proposed this experiment as an attempt to recreate the lost knowledge.
If it were that simple, the novel would more than likely have been trivial and unworthy of Stross’ talent, so of course that’s not it at all. Robin’s military past is very much a part of why he volunteered, as is Curious Yellow. And Charlie, despite dropping dazzling sci-fi tech left and right (lesser authors would have milked this for a bloated trilogy), focuses on the emotional battle of Reeve, Sam and a few others against the three experimentalists.
definitely recommended
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