My intention of reading all of the nominees for the Hugo Awards in the fiction categories hit a bit of a snag yesterday. I finished all the short fiction (novella, novelette, short story), and most of the novels, leaving only Peter Watts's Blindisght and Charlie Stross's Glasshouse. James Nicoll described Peter Watts as the sort of thing he reads when he feels his will to live becoming too strong, and the description of Glasshouse did not fill me with joy. Plus, my copy of Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson just arrived (a birthday present), and I'd really rather read that.
(I'll pause here for a moment to let you think about what it means that a Steven Erikson book sounds like a cheerier prospect than either of the remaining Hugo nominees...)
I was good, though, and opted to read Glasshouse, mostly because Kate just read it, and it needs to go back to the library at some point. I finished it last night, which you might take to be a good sign, but really is more a tribute to pig-headed stubbornness than anything else. I very nearly gave up on this book ninety pages in, and I finished it in one stretch just because I suspected that if I put it down for any reason, even to go to bed, I would never pick it up again.
Glasshouse tells the story of a post-human fellow called Robin who awakens from radical memory surgery to find a letter from his former self telling him that Bad People are chasing him, and he has had most of his memory removed in order to hide knowledge of evil deeds in his past. During the therapy process that's meant to move him back toward being a productive member of society, he learns about an experiment to study the society of the "dark ages" that's looking for volunteers to spend a few years in a simulation of late twentieth century society, cut off from the rest of humanity.
At first, he is not enthusiastic about the prospect of spending time in a "dark ages panopticon theme hotel," but after an attempt on his life, he decides it sounds like a pretty good place to hide out. And so, he signs up, and wakes up inside the experiment to find himself transplanted into a female body, and expected to conform to a version of "dark ages" gender norms, that doesn't sit particularly well:
Domestic duties: the people of the dark ages, when living together, apparently divided up work depending on gender. Males held paid vocations; females were expected to clean and maintain the household, buy and prepare food, buy clothing, clean the clothing, and operate domestic machinery while their male worked. "This is crap!" I say.
"You think so?" [His assigned husband] looks at me oddly.
"Well, yeah. It's straight out of the most primitive nonteach anthro cultures. No advanced society expects half its workforce to stay home and divides labor on arbitrary lines. I don't know what their source for this rubbish is, but it's not plausible. If I had to guess, I'd say they've mistaken radical prescriptive documentation for descriptive."
It goes on like that. For page, after page, after page. Frankly, the only thing less appealing than reading this ham-handed crap would be a lengthy and stupid argument about whether "new atheists" are morally equivalent to civil rights activists, and-- oh, look. Joy.
It does eventually let up a little. Not because the writing develops any subtlety, but because eventually, Robin starts to run out of new "dark ages" concepts to encounter and get huffy about. It never stops entirely, though, and it never gets any less painful. Every expositiory sentence of this book is like being hit in the face with a ball peen hammer.
"What about the plot?" you ask. Really, does it matter? Given how intensely irritating I found the expository material, I wasn't inclined to cut the plot much slack, and looked at in that state, there are a lot of things about it that don't make much sense. I'm sure somebody with a more charitable feeling about the set-up could find ways to retcon them, though, so I won't bother listing them. Also, I don't really care.
If you read the above excerpt, and say "That doesn't seem so bad," go ahead and give this book a try. If the premise sounds excruciating, trust me, it is. Go read something else, because life is just too short.
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Since you've mentioned Charles Stross, it is required by internet law to mention that his novel "Accelerando" is available free online.
I didn't love "Glasshouse". I didn't dislike it as much as you did, but I didn't love it. My favorite of his was "Iron Sunrise", which is something of a sequel to "Singularity Sky", but I read it first, so others can, too.
I can't decide, though, whether I like it more because of my fascination with the universe it's set in than because of the story itself.
If you'd like a more detailed discussion of Glasshouse, let me second Kate's recommendation of the review by L. Timmel Duchamp, that points out most of the stupid elements of the basic set-up.
I didn't love "Glasshouse". I didn't dislike it as much as you did, but I didn't love it. My favorite of his was "Iron Sunrise", which is something of a sequel to "Singularity Sky", but I read it first, so others can, too.
I have a deep loathing of ham-handed satire, so my reaction to this book is probably stronger than many other people would have.
I would agree that Iron Sunrise is the best of his straight SF books-- it's more polished than earlier stuff, and it reins in the worst of his authorial excesses. I'm also fond of his "Laundry" books (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue), which gleefully combine Lovecraft, Dilbert, and spy novels. Accelerando didn't really do it for me, and the Amber knock-offs started to piss me off partway through the second book, so I haven't read the third.
DuChamps' review is the one I wish I had been able to write, except I would never put that much effort into a review of Glasshouse and I don't think I review things quite that well anyway.
I am the target audience for that book, for what it's worth, and I thought it was just awful. Just grindingly awful, for all the reasons Chad points out, all the reasons Duchamps points out, and more. Every time I think back on the book in memory, it actually seems worse in comparison to everything I've read since then.
Perhaps the worst moment was the lynching in the church scene. I'm familiar with the psychological and sociological effects Stross was trying to invoke, and that still didn't work for me at all. Not even a little bit. So basically, it was unbelieveable all the way through, and grindingly preachy in pursuit of a sermon that is blindingly obvious anyway.
I think you might be pleasantly surprised by _Blindsight_.
Doug M.
(I'll pause here for a moment to let you think about what it means that a Steven Erikson book sounds like a cheerier prospect than either of the remaining Hugo nominees...)
Y'know, Reaper's Gale isn't all that depressing. I mean, compared to Memories of Ice, it's almost ... uh, well, let's at least say it rises to "melancholy," instead of "to save time, there's a razor taped to the inside of the back cover."