Citizendia
Your Ad Here

Glasshouse

First edition cover
Author Charles Stross
Cover artist Rita Frangie
Country UK & US
Language English
Genre(s) science fiction
Publisher Orbit (UK), Ace (US)
Publication date June 2006
Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages 352 pp
ISBN ISBN 0-441-01403-8
Preceded by Accelerando

Glasshouse is a science fiction novel by British author Charles Stross, first published in 2006. Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born Leeds, 18 October 1964 is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located The United States of America —commonly referred to as the English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of Literature or Information &ndash the activity of making information available for public view Orbit Books is a British publisher which specialises in Sci-Fi and Fantasy books Ace Books is the oldest active specialty Publisher of Science fiction and Fantasy books A hardcover (or hardback or hardbound) is a Book bound with rigid protective covers (typically of cardboard covered with Cloth Paperback, softback, or softcover describe and refer to a Book by the nature of its binding. Accelerando is a 2005 Science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories by British author Charles Stross The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born Leeds, 18 October 1964 is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. It is a loose sequel to his 2005 novel Accelerando, though it can be read as a "stand-alone" story. Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Accelerando is a 2005 Science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories by British author Charles Stross

Contents

Plot introduction

It is the 27th century. The culture featured in the novel is what has evolved from the time of the last chapter in 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'. The Milky Way (a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn derived from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias sometimes referred to simply In Physics, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of Spacetime that is fundamentally a 'shortcut' through Space and Time

Robin, a male orthohuman, is recovering from a memory excision process in a rehabilitation centre. Though he remembers nothing of his past life(s), 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 realises 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. A Glasshouse, or The Glasshouse was the term for a Military prison in the British Army. Aldershot is a town in the English County of Hampshire, located on heathland about 60 km (37 miles southwest of London.

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. The Panopticon is a type of Prison building designed by English architect Jeremy Bentham in 1785 Philosopher Michel Foucault used the model to represent the way humans tend to conform to and internalize societal ideals based on this kind of omnipresent gaze, an idea Stross exploits in the novel. Michel Foucault ( (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984 was a French philosopher, Historian, Intellectual, Critic and Sociologist.

Background

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. A light-year or light year (symbol ly) is a unit of Length, equal to just under ten trillion Kilometres As defined by 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 firewall is an integrated collection of security measures designed to prevent unauthorized electronic access to a networked computer system

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. Nanotechnology, sometimes shortened to nanotech, refers to a field of Applied science whose theme is the control of matter on an Atomic and Molecular 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. A posthuman or post-human is according to the Transhumanist intellectuals a hypothetical future being " whose basic capacities so radically In Transhumanism and Science fiction, mind uploading (also occasionally referred to by other terms such as mind transfer, whole brain emulation Military-grade versions exist which can be used to download polity-inbound traffic, analyze it for threats/contamination, reroute it to a DMZ, and then reassemble it if all is well. In Computer security, a demilitarized zone ( DMZ) based on military usage of the term but more appropriately known as a demarcation zone or

Mobile Archive Suckers : Large spacecraft or mobile habitats which travel at slower-than-light speeds between the brown dwarf stars which most polities orbit. Brown dwarfs are sub- stellar objects with a mass below that necessary to maintain Hydrogen -burning Nuclear fusion reactions in their cores as do stars Self-contained and self-sufficient, fitted with their own A-gates, they are fueled by plasma piped-in by T-gate from nearby stars. In Physics and Chemistry, plasma is an Ionized Gas, in which a certain proportion of Electrons are free rather than being bound Generally, the ships' systems are not connected to the galactic network at large. The crews and/or 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 posthumanity lives in massive artificial cylindrical habitats, along with a few domed colonies on the planets, moons, and asteroids orbiting brown dwarf stars. A space habitat, also called space colony, orbital colony, space city, or space settlement is a Space station intended as a These can be linked to each other by T-gates, creating a huge network of interconnected societies, known as the Republic of Is.

History

For a variety of reasons, posthumanity has forgotten the history of events preceding, during, and just after the singularity (the "acceleration") as it occurred back in the Solar System, from around 1950 to 2040. The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using Artificial The Solar System consists of the Sun and those celestial objects bound to it by Gravity. They refer to this period as the Dark Ages. Data-storage methods changed so rapidly that proper backups weren't made; much data was encrypted, or stored on perishable media; many individuals hailing from the period excised their memories too many times, creating a historical "bias"; and many "censorship wars" were fought, with computer viruses and worms changing or erasing what was left. For an article about the conceptual problems of the mind see Cognitive closure (philosophy. A computer virus is a Computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user A computer worm is a self-replicating Computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computer terminals on the network and it may do so without

Censorship wars

A long series of these wars plagued posthumanity, starting around 300 years before the novel begins, lasting for almost a century (two centuries, according to Yourdon). Censor factions used A-gates to propagate redactive worms throughout the Republic's networks, which targeted historical data and even memories of why the wars had started in the first place. Historians were singled out for annihilation. These events placed a great strain on the political cohesiveness of the Republic of Is - but worse was to come.

Curious Yellow

Persons unknown created a worm of enormous destructive capability - Curious Yellow. Like previous worms it used the A-gates to spread, but it also used the people who traveled with/uploaded to them as transmission vectors. An infected A-gate would surreptitiously delete swaths of personal memory from a victim, particularly memories associated with historical knowledge of pre-Republic times. It would then force a copy of its kernel into the victim's netlink (the Cyberware which everyone uses to connect to and communicate with the gate networks) along with some bootstrap functions. In Computer science, the kernel is the central component of most computer Operating systems (OS Cyberware is a relatively new and unknown field (a Proto-science, or more adequately a “proto-technology” In computing bootstrapping ("to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps" refers to techniques that allow a simple system to activate a more complicated system

The infected victim, upon encountering a "clean" A-gate, would then feel compelled to switch the gate into debugger mode, enter a set of commands, then upload him/herself, after which the gate would execute the infected boot-loader in his/her netlink, copy it into its working set, and thus become infected in turn. A debugger is a Computer program that is used to test and Debug other programs Peter Denning (1968 defines “the working set of information W(t \tau of a process at time t to be the collection of information referenced

When a set amount of gates in a network became infected, they would begin communicating with each other and create privileged instruction channels which could be used by shadowy controllers with the correct authentication keys to control them remotely. They could defend themselves against attack, build and direct weapons to selected targets, and netlink to any number of T-gates.

Eventually, the republic crumbled under the pressure, converting into a series of isolated, heavily firewalled polities.

Curious Yellow is derived from the remark of Lord Rayleigh in 1871, "Sir John Herschel even thinks that our inability to resolve yellow leaves it doubtful whether our vision is trichromatic or tetrachromatic. . . " It takes a soft materialistic approach to the Problem of Minds in a human society that has taken a rational approach to the subjective human senses. It is also derived from a paper on worm design by Brandon Wiley: Curious Yellow: The First Coordinated Worm Design.

Recovery

However, there were those who fought back. A variety of militia groups formed, among them the Linebarger Cats, who specialized in esoteric strategies and psyops. Psychological Operations ( PSYOP, PSYOPS) are techniques used by Military and Police forces to influence a target audience's value They formed and acted on a plan to "repurpose" the worm, rewriting its code as an "immune system" and introducing it, slowly but surely, into the A-gates. Millions died as the worm fought back, but they eventually succeeded.

After Curious Yellow's destruction, a number of Quisling dictatorships formed, using hacked versions of the worm to spread in an attempt to form separatist dystopias, populated by brainwashed populations led by sinister "cognitive dictators". But these were mopped-up one-by-one, and the galaxy returned to a semblance of normality with the firewalled polities building "clean" A-gates to carefully re-integrate. The Invisible Republic became one of the largest new networks.

Plot summary

As far as the participants are concerned, the YFH (Yourdon-Fiore-Hanta) polity is probably situated in an orbital habitat which used to be a secure, heavily firewalled military prison (a glasshouse) after the war, for the treatment and "de-programming" of serious war criminals, making it an ideal choice for such an isolated social experiment.

Reeve believes she has signed-up for a period not exceeding 3 years. She is part of a cohort of 10 vounteers, who are all expected to partner with a member of the opposite sex, as was the practice in the Dark Ages. There are, initially, 20 cohorts. Participants get points for staying in dark-age character, and individual scores affects the cohort. Collective accountability and peer pressure is the order of the day; "bad behaviour" is discouraged. Pregnancy, the barbaric method of dark-age child production, is encouraged, much to Reeve's horror. Of course, modern technology is not allowed.

Reeve constantly wonders if she "knows" any of the other volunteers, particularly Kay, who was also going to join the experiment. However, people keep quiet about their pasts, and, of course, everyone wears a new body; even gender. As the experiment progresses, Reeve becomes concerned about the "tone" of the scenarios, in particular the church meetings all must attend on Sundays. She also begins to experience a series of dreams, in which flashbacks from her past lives are revealed.

For something to do, she applies for, and gets, a job in the library, where she meets Janis, who becomes a confidant. Fiore, one of the sinister leaders of the project, often visits the library repository, a room which is always kept locked. She finds a way to make a copy of Fiore's key. Later, two people are hanged after mob violence, encouraged by Fiore, erupts after a church meeting. Reeve, and her "husband" Sam, begin to seriously doubt the validity of the experiment. They also realise that neither of them can hear the other saying the words "I love you", which makes them think that during the A-gate upload which placed them in the polity, their mindstates were subtly altered. She also begins to experience strange "whiteouts" in which she can't remember what she's done.

Back at the library, Reeve uses the copied key to enter the repository. It contains many boxes of sheets of paper which she thinks may be a hex dump of the Curious Yellow worm. Hex dump is a Hexadecimal view (on screen or a printout of Computer memory. Opening a trapdoor, she goes down and discovers a military-grade A-gate. She places a small cine-camera in a discreet location to record what Fiore does when he's inside. In a later visit, she recovers the camera, and while watching it, she realises that Fiore had programmed the A-gate to begin a time-delayed copy of himself, knowing someone had been in the room. She catches him emerging, kills and dismembers him, and feeds the parts to the gate. During this event, her mind blanks again, to the extent that she suspects that her mind is carrying unknown coding.

She decides to try to escape. Using a previously noticed door in the side of a road-tunnel, she climbs a shaft; thinking that she is in a small section of a habitat, she hopes to find a neutral place from which she can contact the outside world. Eventually she finds out that the polity is actually situated within an MASucker which has only 1 heavily-guarded T-gate and is on a voyage which will not end for almost 200 years. Falling ill, she wakes back in the polity hospital. Treated by the sinister Dr. Hanta, she is told that the polity's population is going to be increased to that of a small city. Cured, she returns home, but both she, and Sam, realise that her mind has been altered by Hanta to be more amenable to the polity. Back at work she meets Fiore, who, it turns out, is really her. After she killed Fiore a few days before she backed herself up in the A-gate and used Fiore's physical parameters as an overlay to make a copy (she "blanked" at the time, and didn't remember). Discovering that Janis is Sanni, Sanni forces a merge of the two instances of Reeve, which removes whatever Hanta did to her mind.

Reeve discovers that her "true" mission was to infiltrate the polity and gather intelligence. Previous attempts by the Linebarger Cats failed, as their agent's memories were probed by the polity's leaders who then killed them. This explained the effective memory-wipes that Robin/Reeve had to endure. The 3 polity leaders were Curious Yellow sleeper-cells who were planning to use the 200-year journey to breed a population that would, at journey's end, re-infect the galactic network by uploading through A-gates and vectoring a new, hacked version of the worm, thus re-starting the war. Eventually, Reeve, Sam, and Janis succeed in their mission to thwart the polity leaders, and the ship's journey resumes peacefully.

Characters in Glasshouse

Major themes

Self-concept, self image, the "self", peer pressure, conformism, problem of other minds, redemption. Self-concept or self identity refers to the global understanding a sentient being has of him or herself A person's self image is the mental picture generally of a kind that is quite resistant to change that depicts not only details that are potentially available to objective The self is a key construct in several schools of Psychology, broadly referring to the cognitive representation of one's identity Peer Pressure is a term describing the pressure exerted by a Peer group in encouraging a person to change their Attitude, Behavior and/or Morals Conformism is a term used to describe the suspension of an individual's self-determined actions or opinions in favor of Obedience to the mandates or conventions The problem of other minds has traditionally been regarded as an Epistemological challenge raised by the Skeptic.

Allusions/references to other works

Awards and nominations

Trivia

Release details

Paperback edition
Paperback edition
Country Publisher ISBN number Cover Release date
US Ace ISBN 0-441-01403-8 Hardback June 2006
UK Orbit ISBN 1-84149-392-9 Hardback July 2006
UK Orbit ISBN 1-84149-393-7 Paperback March 2007
US Ace ISBN 0-441-01508-5 Paperback June 2007

Also available as an eBook, in PDF & LIT format, from various sources.

External links

References

  1. ^ "Linebarger Cats" mentioned throughout. Orbit PB, p. 343/4 : "At first we live off the capital freed up by the Cats' liquidation; later we supplement it by setting up a variety of business fronts. (If you've ever heard of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or Cordwainer Heavy Industries, that's us. )"
  2. ^ Orbit PB, p. 54, ". . . the age of emotional machines, as one Dark Age shaman named it".
  3. ^ A minor character in the novel is named "Alice Sheldon", which was Tiptree's real name.
  4. ^ Quotes from the novel : "Welcome to the Village" ; "Be seeing you!". The cohort to which Reeve belongs is designated Number Six.
  5. ^ A "hymn" that is sung in the YFH polity's Church of the Nazarene (Orbit PB, p. 182).
  6. ^ "Curious Yellow is a design study for a really scary worm: one that uses algorithms developed for peer-to-peer file sharing networks to intelligently distribute countermeasures and resist attempts to decontaminate the infected network". (Stross's blog, Fri, 25 Oct 2002, posted at 18:47).
  7. ^ From the poem :
    "He took his vorpal sword in hand. . . .
    One, two! One, two! And through and through
    The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
    He left it dead, and with its head
    He went galumphing back    ".
    The Vorpal blade is a weapon, able to cut space and time, featured in the novel. Vorpal sword is a phrase used by Lewis Carroll in his nonsense poem " Jabberwocky "
  8. ^ He is name-checked in the novel; Orbit PB, p. 214.
    "I'd been reading up on the Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram's studies on how to make ordinary folks commit atrocities. And I got this crazy idea: what if you ran the Zimbardo prison study protocol in something not unlike Varley's Eight Worlds universe, with gender roles instead of prisoner/guard roles?". Eight Worlds refers to a series of novels and short stories by John Varley, in which the Solar system has been colonized by human refugees fleeing an alien (Stross interviewed by Asimov's magazine, 2003).
  9. ^ ". . . Of late he's changed pace and stride, but in the 1970s he was a couple of decades ahead of the rest of the field. I was so annoyed by his latest novel, Red Thunder - it's basically a Heinleinian juvenile, a good example of the type but fundamentally less impressive than the work he's capable of - that I sat down and wrote a Varleyesque short novel myself". Red Thunder is a 2003 Science fiction novel written by John Varley. Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7 1907 – May 8 1988 was an American Novelist and Science fiction Writer. (SciFi.com interview with Stross, Sep 2003).
  10. ^ Hart wrote The Tanks - A History of the Royal Tank Regiment and its Predecessors: Volumes I and II (Praeger, New York, 1959).
    During Robin/Reeve's time with the Linebarger Cats as a cyborged "tank", his callout sign was Liddellhart (Orbit PB, p. 245).
  11. ^ A quote from the short story is printed at the start of the novel.
  12. ^ "Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?". This is quoted at the start of the novel, and on p. 337 (Orbit PB). (text).
© 2009 citizendia.org; parts available under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License, from http://en.wikipedia.org
 Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic