Obsolete Your Idols

I’ve finally dropped the default fancy style sheet and images directory where the generated HTML was pointing at it so now the planet looks a touch prettier.  Also added two new feeds for it:  this blog, and comments to it.

You know who else I’ve never read but should? Charles Stross. That’s who. So I did! In fact, I read Glasshouse all in a rush. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in this book if you’re the kind of reader who likes to anticipate what might happen next. This book is the story of how far some people are willing to go. Some of the people in question are trying to effect massive social change and some of the other people in question are trying to resist and undo that change. It’s seen from the point of view of a conflicted and memory-scarred character.

I’d like to talk more about the plot of this book, but I’m conflicted on this. A lot of the enjoyment I got from the book was from figuring out what might be really going on and what might happen next. I would prefer not to deprive anyone of that same opportunity so if that’s the kind of reader you are, stop here and go pick it up.

For anyone who doesn’t like that, here’s what the book is like. We’re introduced to a protagonist who is suffering the emotionally chaotic after-effects of voluntarily undergoing selective memory removal. I’ll call the protagonist he, though for most of the novel, he’s a she. He volunteers for a study which will consume the rest of the length of this novel. The study, of course, is something other than it’s purported to be but he doesn’t know that when he enters. Or does he? Because it turns out this isn’t his memory edit just before novel start isn’t his first and an earlier instance knew that something was going on.

So once the protagonist is a she, things really take off. Previously concealed forces come into the light, internal and external to our protagonist. We get to see her strive and succeed, as well as strive and fail, to solve the mysteries of the setting and overcome hindrances. She’s very easy to cheer for, even as she reveals to us that she has previously been an amoral killing machine, quite literally. The study is actually a former asylum of sorts, now modified to be a panoptic prison.

This novels reminds me of some of the best aspects of Philip K. Dick and John Varley but puts it together in a style I couldn’t see either of them managing. This book is slick and only seems transparent from the outside.

Who might like this book

• Fans of post-Scarcity fiction
• Fans of PKD, John Varley, John Le Carre, Iain Banks
• People with bodytype dysphoria
• People who keep seeing Charles Stross’s name and wondering what a good accessible book by him might be
• People who’ve undergone memory redaction, voluntary or in-

Who might not like this book

• People who don’t like to have a character develop new levels on them
• People who don’t like the reveal of the Great and Powerful Oz as a huckster
• People who think gender, sex, and attraction are fixed and invariant

I think I probably put the book Ribofunk on my wishlist when I ran across Paul Di Filippo’s name in the context of being a writer on Top Ten.  That hazy path of recollection seems fitting in light of this collection of stories set in what seems to be the same future.  A future where organic technology has advanced by leaps and bounds.

As a collection of short stories, these are all over the place, with regards to voice, character and plot, which is nice.  They seem to be arrayed chronologically for the setting, which is also nice.  But with that kind of variety, they weren’t all equally engaging for me.  None of them were unenjoyable but some were perhaps a bit longer than my interest span.

Notable favorite stories from this collection

• Big Eater
• McGregor
• Brain Wars
• Up the Lazy River

So if you’re looking for some wet cyberpunk stylings with different genre spicing and a shared setting, this is a pretty good collection of that.

Who might like this book

• Biologists
• Futurists
• People tired of rocket ships, zap guns and space queens in their sf

Who might not like this book

• People looking for longer cohesive explorations of the themes
• People who prefer to ethically treat animals rather than eat tasty animals