On "Glasshouse" and the irrelevance of transhumanist character development
A review of "Glasshouse" (2006) by Charles Stross
Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
Science Fiction: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
Literary: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
Vibe: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
[No spoiler section]
Glasshouse (2006) by Charlie Stross has a cyberpunk detective noir/pulp veering into Tom Clancy spy thriller vibe. “I just got out of the bioreformatter 20 cycles ago and headed to a holo-suite made up to resemble a 90s dive bar just for the kicks; the memories of death in my former form still sharp in my silicon-enhanced hippocampus.” Not an actual line in the book, but not far off. The narration in Blade Runner (1982) came to mind. Occasionally I would read lines in Harrison Ford’s attempted-sabotage non-tone (or so the story goes). I’m not going to write up content warnings, but be assured there are many. If Greg Egan (my review of Diaspora here) was more of an edgelord, this seems like what he might write.
The major technology in the story (introduced in the first pages, so not really a spoiler) is effectively a combination of mind uploading and 3D printing bodies. A mind is like a source code repo that can be forked and merged running on 3D printed hardware. I do have to say that this is one of the better visions of how this might work out — and excellent example of spec fic. However this sort of transhumanism has a tremendous cost in terms of the story. I don’t really care about people who have backups elsewhere1, and when you’ve been all kinds of things, lived all kinds of lives, what character development can you really have? The best this book has to offer is a character using this technology to escape from trauma or their past, but then re-engaging with it.
That said, I did enjoy reading Glasshouse. Mostly. When it wasn’t talking about the awfulness of humans. It’s not that I want to shield myself from awfulness (Children of Time left me wanting more awfulness instead of deleting the agency of the characters) — it’s just in this case there was no moral lesson. Some people are messed up, or will do messed up things if incentivized to do them by social forces. Don’t set up social forces that incentivize messed up behavior, I guess?
[Spoiler section]
I've heard there's an episode of Black Mirror (edit: there is — here) where people are rated social-media-like which has the effect of making people into conformists of the “customer service rep” type. Always selling a product: yourself. Gotta get those views.
I tend to feel like this is something of an inaccurate metaphor of real-life social interactions and social forces — somehow they are something that is externally generated, something that people would not stand for if given true freedom. It seems to be a common view held by those of us who grew up outside of “the popular crowd” in high school. The normies are somehow the actual sociopaths, unable to be genuinely human without a guiding external force whether scarlet letters or likes.
In my experience there are just as many sociopaths among the iconoclasts as the normies, and that while people respond to incentives the way those incentives are perceived are not universal. My own crackpot theory of economic incentives is that new regions of state space open up and some people will find it — whether through searching or through accident.
The fictional technology elements are inventive and varied, and the references to/jumps from real technology are entertaining. The novel doesn’t have any pretentions to being “hard sci fi” so doesn’t need a case study as part of my quixotic tilting at the term. It’s just a free flowing jazz riff on still-relevant trends taken to new and complex places — at least in terms of world-building.
There was one lol from me with regard to a reference to Hamiltonian paths. Hamiltonian paths wouldn’t be a property of the connections between destinations, but rather a property one or more paths through the connections that only has mathematical relevance given the T-gates are instantaneous transitions from a one space to another. Instantaneous connections eliminates the relevance of distance in e.g. the seven bridges or travelling salesman problems — something needs to weight the edges of the graphs to make different paths through them different to make a the existence of a Hamiltonian path physically relevant. This is all to say it’s not a relevant property to Reeve/Robin who is doing practical things. Regardless, this is about the only “flaw” I saw that wouldn’t fall under the broad umbrella of artistic license2.
The book sets up a kind of Stanford Prison Experiment (the novel was written before the spate of recent articles overturning or critiquing many “classic” results from psychology) where the inmates (“experiment volunteers”) are given points akin to social media “likes” to act like 1950s society (the “dark age” per the book — where much information has been lost). The book shines where it illuminates the actual issues historians have in trying to reconstruct lives from long ago from limited evidence with lots of holes. Of course, this experiment has ulterior motives beyond accurate reconstruction. However, accurate reconstruction using this particular era helps those motives, so it’s not a random scenario for a place to breed a new stock of humans stripped of netlinks and A-gates — and the modern social conventions that accompany them.
There are odd moments in this fantasy world that require a modern audience to fill in the perception in the world rather than it growing organically from the characters. For example, at one point to try to “test” the limits of the scoring system the protagonist Reeve/Robin strips nude in a restaurant. Why would they think to strip in the restaurant? As they say themselves, they (Reeve/Robin) don’t get the over-reaction to it — so why would they think it is a test of the experiment’s parameters? Coming from a society where you can change bodies at will, even beyond “orthohuman” forms, why would they (in-universe) think this would push the limits? I could see Reeve/Robin doing this randomly because they didn’t think about it, but as a “test” seems unnatural. There is a hint that Robin was an historian who might know a bit better (they don’t have access to their ubiquitous internet “netlink” in the experiment) — but then the character they are with seems to object as if they know it’s going to be shocking as well.
It’s as if Stross has an idea of something that we, the audience, today would see as “shocking” but his enlightened future society has no issue with and uses our (i.e. the readers’) mores instead of what the character would think to do. If this book was written in the early 1900s, Stross would have the character swear or use the wrong fork or something. In the 1400s, Reeve would make some kind of heretical claim — not because the character would think of it, but because the 1900s or 1400s audience would see those actions as “shocking”. In the same way Darth Vader is made important in the Star Wars prequels because the way the audience sees him rather than what the story says, we are relying on our audience instead of the characters to determine action.
This is part of the reason I said it was edgelord-y above — the shocking elements derive from shocking our, i.e. the readers’, sensibilities and not necessarily organically growing from the characters’ or society’s. Kudos to this novel being written in 2006 when this kind of scoreboard wasn’t yet a fixture of the zeitgeist — people are doing more and more terrible things for the views which are functioning exactly like Glasshouse’s point system. I just wish the larger transhumanist world this story is embedded in didn’t render character development largely meaningless.
Tension has be to re-created by having the characters not know if they have backups.
There’s nanomachinery in the book which would generally be inefficient. Things like friction and surface tension are not huge deals to macro-scale humans but nano-scale machines don’t deal with them well — and even tend to run the wrong way as much as they do useful work.