‘Glasshouse’ and ‘Accelerando’

A few years ago I saw ‘The Magic Flute’ (I think that’s what it was, I could be wrong) and there was a quite enchanting set-piece: large, angled rocks to illustrate a bluffs area and a thin, wiry tree. Something about the setup really struck me. The same could be said of Charles Stross’ ‘Glasshouse’: the set upon which the story plays out is enchanting. The difference between ‘The Magic Flute’ and ‘Glasshouse’ is that the set of the latter is much more interesting than the characters who appear on it. I was impressed with the ‘Flute’ set design, my focus was always on the characters and the story. I’m sorry to say this, but the Glasshouse of ‘Glasshouse’ is more fascinating than Reeve or Sam or Sanni; the universe of both ‘Accelerando‘ and ‘Glasshouse’ are deeper and more interesting than the one-sentence descriptions Stross sees fit to whet our appetites with.

‘Glasshouse’ is a good book. It has an interesting story, its share of surprises, a bit of action, a veritable wealth of quotable descriptions, musings and utterances… but it could have been so much more. Stross has at his disposal a gloriously architectured world in which literally anything is possible, and he barely scratches the surface. Instead of delving into the vast possibilities of the 27th century, nine-tenths of the book (starting on digital page 129 of 1060) are spent inside a ‘simulation’ detailing pre-Singularity human society – the latter half of the 20th century in one of the developed countries. Want a visual example? Imagine a Star Trek movie where the first 10 minutes are spent aboard the ship, and the rest of the film happens in faux-Indianapolis during the 1950′s, with the entire crew forced to abide by the rules and societal norms of the times. That means no phasers, no androids (sorry Data), no spaceships, no inter-racial or same-sex romance (are there same-sex relationships in Star Trek now?) and, please, no talking about any of this – it ruins the realism. It means that Troi spends her days shopping, gossiping with Crusher and trying to get pregnant, while Riker and Picard work in a fake insurance company, shuffling papers across a desk for the sake of appearances. That is exactly what’s happening in the book. Boring? Yeah, somewhat. Why do we have to spend time on a character shopping in a department store when we can explore the underlying concepts of transport- and assembly-gates, brain uploads, habitats orbiting brown dwarfs, achievable immortality, memory-erasing viruses, post-singularity society, humanity’s self-imposed exile from the Solar System, the freedom to be who and what you want to be (Want to be a four-armed woman? OK. Want to be a blue hermaphrodite centaur with chain-mail hauberk and no pants? Fine.), and, last but in no way least, the social implications of everything I have just mentioned. Which do you suppose I would like to read about?!

In this sense, Stross really reminds me of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. Sure, Douglas Adams didn’t bother to cover in depth many of the concepts he mentioned, but his work was a comedy long before being science-fiction.

If Stross has a failing, it is his inability to stop writing future-set soap operas. ‘Singularity Sky’, ‘Iron Sunrise’, ‘Accelerando’ and ‘Glasshouse’ all exhibit the same weakness: were the story set in a duller environment, it would be shelved alongside John Grisham and Dan Brown. The only sci-fi element is often-times the setting, and the concepts beneath that are skimmed oh-so-carefully so as not to disturb the giants laying dormant.

‘Singularity Sky’ and ‘Iron Sunrise’

The novels are both good, but, as I mentioned above, they barely touch upon the science and instead spend most of the time simply in the fiction end of the pool. There is a fair amount of political intrigue, a bit of romance, some disturbing imagery to illustrate the depravity of the antagonists and the perils of technology and, this is sort of strange, very little shoot-em-up action. What small amount of action scenes Stross does present us with, they’re mostly rather bland and are over entirely too quickly.

‘Singularity Sky’ is a story of an out-dated societal model (early Soviet-era Communists) attempting to stop a Singularity. At times the novel hits very close to home, reminding so much of the old country. Overall a good, light read.

‘Iron Sunrise’ is a sequel to ‘Singularity Sky’, only now it has left the Communists and moved on to the Nazis. I’m not kidding: the bad guys are trying to purify humanity, change them to fit a specific mold. They go around referring to each-other using names like “Oberkommando der Wehrmacht”. Like, but not quite: I can’t find the actual names they use, but they are long and contain an insane number of consonants.

Read Stross. I don’t hesitate to recommend anything written by Charles Stross. Sure, I’ll mention that you’ll be getting less science than ‘Rendezvous with Rama’, but it’s certainly more than Heinlein has ever dished out. I guess it’s somewhere in the middle. A very good place to be, actually.