Glasshouse

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Excellent cutting edge SF submitted by ekauppi on November 29, 2007, 9:11pm This book has enough truly new ideas in the first two chapters to provide a month's food for thought. And then the action starts. Wow!

In the far future, everything from oil and food to luxury goods can be produced so cheaply that they're essentially free. Charles Stross calls it the end of scarcity, and the information economy. Just try to imagine what this will do to every aspect of human society, politics, and activity.

Mr. Stross also postulates that humans are mostly information, plus some cheap materials. Humans can back themselves up, modify the data before restoring it to flesh, make multiple copies, and so on. The possibilities are endless, and fascinating.

Of course all is not well in paradise. The human tendency to try to control the actions and thoughts of others is alive and well, but the wars are fought in very new ways. Fortunately the war is in the past of this book, this is not a war story.

If you read to get new ideas, this book will turn your world upside down. If you read for enjoyment of action and characters, this book also delivers. The characters are quite well drawn and very different from you and me although still completely human. The action moves right along too. It's all very well put together, with the action keeping the pages turning to expose the new ideas, and the ideas enabling new action and character growth.

This may be the best book I have read this year.

Enjoyable submitted by illy on July 31, 2013, 12:08pm Decent science fiction with great ideas and good plot. Felt that the characters were a bit stiff and 2 dimensional, but otherwise enjoyed the book.

A weird look at today submitted by Jen Chapin-Smith on June 17, 2014, 7:51pm Robin's memory has recently been erased, so he's adrift--literally and metaphorically--on a spaceship in the 27th century. When he meets an intriguing young woman he agrees to join a long-term experiment with her. Participants will live as couples in a ship whose inside looks like a 20th century suburb in the US or Europe. All participants get a new identity. Unbeknownst to Robin, however, he also gets a new body to go with this new identity. How well do 27th century individuals adapt to a way of life 700 years old and totally out of date?

The book has some very scary and creepy parts, including domestic violence to the level of torture and a deliberate decision by those in charge to look the other way. It is a compelling story about how people find their way in a society completely different to their own and under difficult circumstances.

Glasshouse won the 2007 Prometheus Award for 2007 and was nominated for the 2007 Hugo, Campbell, and Locus Awards.