Glasshouse (ISBN 0441014038)

"In the Village":
Charles Stross's extremely clever, if extremely loopy, "Glasshouse" imagines a far future of travel by teleportation (through assembler gates--wait for it), body alterations, physical backups, and a worm that reprograms people's memories. The hero is (a male) named Robin who's just gone through memory erasure (perhaps voluntarily). In order to avoid what he believes are assassins pursuing him, he volunteers for an experiment in which people live as they did during the "dark ages." Although the dark ages in question are the 20th and 21st centuries. Stross has a clever idea: the records from the earlier part of the period, when paper and ink was still the primary method of data storage, will have proved more durable than electronic storage, in which data has been lost due to the constant procession of different, competing storage devices. Anyhow, the world Robin (now a female named Reeve) finds (her)self in has late-20th/early 21st-century tech (mobile phones, microwaves), but a social structure from the period of 50 years before, with men going to work and women staying home. Robin/Reeve, however, quickly discovers that the danger to (her)self lies precisely within the parameters of the experiment, and not with assassins without. Of course, she tries to do something about this, and the thrills start. The book's a kick, with wild speculations, hat-tips to Franz Kafka, Alice Sheldon, Paul A. Linebarger, the old "The Prisoner" tv miniseries, and the computer worm that's featured so prominently in the book is named Curious Yellow. But maybe Mr. Stross isn't quite as clever as he thinks he is; sometimes the breathless first-person present-tense narration by Robin/Reeve devolves into cute or technobabble. And the ending feels rushed. But it will sustain your interest over the course of its 333 cramped pages packed with too-small print. (You'll need to visit your opthalmologist when you finally put the book aside.) Some publishers have been improving the look and feel of their small-size paperbacks. This publisher has not joined the party.

Almost Gave Up On It:
This is really strange to the point of being wacky at times, especially in the beginning. He invents a lot of new technologies, and I had a hard time figuring out what things were what and how they were supposed to work until about midway through the book. Apparently I can't tell my T-gates from my A-gates. The technology in Stross' universe allows people to create or to become anything they can imagine, which really makes it more of a fantasy type of novel than anything else(there are blue centaurs and four armed people). You really have to check your brain at the door for a lot of the book. He gets into the meaning of identity; physical appearances, external surroundings, memory, and he thoroughly screws with the three to entertaining results. He really doesn't get too deep or philosophical in his examination of identity, which I would have liked to see, but nevertheless he uses the constantly shifting appearances of his characters for a few fun twists. I also like how he envisions the future of warfare being almost exclusively psycological. Still, in the end it's the kind of book that you have to want to enjoy. The ending left me smiling at least.

Inspector Plod (Ms):
Imagine a police procedural, where the first person detective is...dumb as a sack of doorknobs, I mean painfully so, to the extent other characters point it out. Stross inflicts a female Inspector Plod on the Scottish police, and shame on him (real Scots women would make haggis out of his innards for it). The mystery is set in a software company that develops games. All of THEM are cluless (americans is the subtext) while Ms. Insp. Plod gets pissed off and punishes them for being techies with her plodness. Someone says I need to rush off to...She says, you'll sit here all day and night until you make some pointless statement I won't understand anyway, just because I can make you. Etc. Oh, and she is worried about her kid, and maybe not getting home in time for dinner, and how trivial is some multi-million dollar hacker sabatoge, when she has real crime, like stolen car radios to fight. The gamer aspects of this are kind of interesting, although the software "back chat" is ultimately pointless (Ok, so developing the TRS-80 was tough, who cares now). Skipped over is the whole, more interesting idea of introducing crime to the "second life" universe, which might have been fun. Real life has now evolved to where networks of vandals exist to trash seond life type intereactives, so, yeah, a criminal conspiracy to make some real bucks off it...cool. Cybercrime, however, is so much more profitable (billions in the US alone), and so far over the heads of the local coppers - well that would be a much better book, but a lot harder to write, and, sadly, way beyond the scope of Stross' tedious fascination with lefty neo-puitan future Scotland. Skip even the used version of this one.

My least favorite Stross to date.:
The beginning of this book irritated me so very much that I nearly put it down. I could not stand the smug "looky! quaint 20th century customs as seen by future anthropologists!" trope that Stross was using. I did not care how many little sly references he included (the curious yellow virus), it was annoying. I am glad that I persisted and it did get less annoying as the book progressed. Stross makes it clear that he is winking at his own conceit and that made it (marginally) more interesting. Although it does improve as it progresses, it still feels quite empty next to the far superior Accelerando. It may be that people who do not like his other work will find more to hold in the plot with this one. Despite the identity-hopping trappings, Glasshouse is actually surprisingly straight-up for Stross.

Linebarger's Cat:
To paraphrase a character in one of his previous novels, Charles Stross is fifteen minutes into everyone else's future. This novel might be the best self-contained (rather than serialized) example of Stross's tremendous imagination and intellect, and his utterly mindbending muse is surely at the forefront of cyberpunk and many other sub-genres of science fiction. (Also watch for some sly namedropping of worshippable old cult faves like Cordwainer Smith.) Notwithstanding Stross's ultra-futuristic gadgetry, this story utilizes a fairly simple device - the old outside observer method from a jillion sci-fi novels - and unleashes a fascinating and mindboggling exploration of our current society. In the 27th Century, our current time period will appear to be a dark age because we're storing all of our knowledge in soon-to-be-obsolete file types. The future characters in this story volunteer for a bizarre experiment in historical reconstruction, living in a fractured scientific version of the early 21st Century. This inspires the highly wired future characters to comment devastatingly on the current human condition. But the whole scheme might be a dictatorial social conditioning project to return future humans to the stifling social control under which we are now suffering (and don't even know it). In the process, Stross also explores the potentially bizarre ramifications of modern cyberpunk devices like viruses and physical replication among networked humans. Granted, the story gets a bit out of hand at times with cloak-and-dagger shenanigans and networked conspiracies. But the book is a truly mind-warping read in which Stross explores what lies in the future of computerized human societies, with a great look at how oppressive current human society will look hundreds of years from now. (~doomsdayer520~)