Glasshouse by Charles Stross

I’ve been reading a an omnibus collection of old SF stories lately, in a book picked up in a library sale for 20p. These are stories published in the middle of the 20th Century – at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, which some people term the Golden Age, or even the First Golden Age. It’s an era I’ve always liked, though as time goes on the connection between the fiction and what we know of science becomes increasingly remote. I read them now mainly for their nostalgia value: a simpler time, when people were free to imagine the growing of giant fungii in laboratories, when the Soviet Empire was in its pomp, and the Cold War was just getting started.

The Golden Age was followed by the New Wave, which I haven’t got as much time for. It’s either a load of old wank (Aldiss, Ballard), worthy-but-dull (Le Guin) or just apeshit (Dick). Some of it’s all right, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to seek it out.

Then came Cyberpunk, which I also think is largely a load of old wank: there’s too much showing off and not enough story. I’m a complete story whore: I read for the plot, and I’m not interested in the author’s theories about how language will evolve: whatever.

A more recent science fiction trend has been to think in terms of the Singularity: the paradigm shift that will see us all evolving beyond our current state of consciousness and becoming post-human. What can I say? The words “wank” and “a load of old” spring too easily to mind. I’m not a believer in paradigm shifts. As I’m fond of saying, it took 600 years of the observed data not fitting the theory for the so-called Copernican Revolution to happen. Not so much a paradigm shift as a slow moving dead weight.

It’s like what Kuhn says about Einsteinian physics. If Einstein was right, then Newton was wrong, but most of us still muddle along quite happily in a Newtonian universe. Human beings, argues Michel Serres are only ever 1% “modern” – the other 99% is ancient. We’re ancient up to our eyeballs, which is why we’re all so fucking irrational. We are still living in a world dominated by religious ideas which are thousands of years old.

Are we suddenly going to forget all this and become post-human? Maybe. British readers may remember some time ago Prince Charles banging on about Grey Goo: the nightmarish result of out-of-control self-replicating nano-technology. It’s the sort of thing Michael Crichton writes books about.

Anyway, Charles Stross’s Glasshouse is set in a post-human universe, one in which nano-technology and other wonders allow humans to transport themselves instantly from place to place, and manufacture just about anything with an Assembler-Gate – including copies of themselves made from suitable backups. In such a universe, human beings can adopt any physical form they wish, and can even edit memories.

The narrator of Glasshouse, Robin, is one such, who wakes up after a long war with a radically edited memory, and then finds himself in a female body living within an experimental society based on the “Dark Ages” – which start right around the time of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1950s) and end some time in the middle of the 21st Century.

This experimental polity is a mixed-up version of the times we now live in, complete with irrational beliefs and rules, as well as rigid gender roles and huge pressure to conform to an “ideal”.

It’s social satire, of course, not “about” the future, but a barbed reminder that we are indeed (still) living in the dark ages. At times funny (as when the remade Robin/Reeve describes 21st Century customs using the puzzled terminology of his/her times) and disturbing (peer pressure is an ugly thing), this is as good as this post-human Singularity stuff gets: which is to say, it has its faults (a tad repetitive and slow-moving at times), but still manages to err on the side of entertaining.

Recommended.

Spin – by Robert Charles Wilson

It was one of those “out on a limb” books during the writing — the kind where you ask yourself, “Can I get away with this?” But they don’t pay you for timidity, I guess. Every time I’ve stuck my neck out, in the literary sense, I’ve been rewarded for it.

Robert Charles Wilson is fast becoming one of my favourite SF writers. I’ve already reviewed The Chronoliths and Blind Lake on this blog. Surprisingly, The Chronoliths didn’t immediately strike me on first reading, and it was only when I picked it up a second time that I really got into it. Probably I was stressed and/or thinking about something else the first time I read it. Blind Lake presented no such problems, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Spin is Wilson’s most recent book, and it’s a corker. The breadth and depth of his imagination is incredible, but more than that, this is a beautifully-written book, too. Its style reminded me – throughout – of Douglas Coupland, and there’s almost no higher praise I can give. Imagine if Douglas Coupland sat down and wrote an extraordinary science fiction novel, and you’d – possibly – get something like Spin.

The Spin of the title is an acknowledged misnomer – as becomes clear as the plot develops. Simple human frailty is one of the key themes of this book, and it’s the all-too-human inability to encompass scientific vastness that causes “the Spin” to be misunderstood and misnamed. There’s also the background hum of political spin to consider, and that too is a theme of this great book. What happens to politics, what happens to society, when we are confronted with a technology so advanced and so powerful that it is clear that human politicians are irrelevant?

Like a Coupland novel, Spin revolves around three close friends, characters whose relationships are often strained but nevertheless enduring. The three are sitting out under the night sky one day in their youth, and the stars go out. The reason for this – and the consequences of it – are everlasting, and the three individuals come to cope with events in their own ways.

What is blocking out the stars turns out to be an advanced technology put in place by a hypothetical alien intelligence. The universe outside the apparent barrier is vastly accelerated relative to time on earth, which remains – subjectively – the same to those who still live there.

The idea that human brains can’t cope with vast scales – like geological time, like distances measured in light years – is not new. The climate change lobby has had to invent ever more urgent reasons for people to worry about so-called global warming, simply because it became clear that a vague threat over 100 years hence just wasn’t seen as “a clear and present danger” by most people. So instead we have this invented “sudden onset” climate change, and every weather anomaly is seen as a further sign of our doom.

In Spin, the time outside the Earth’s artificial bubble is moving so quickly that millennia pass in a matter of subjective months. And it’s Wilson’s creative play with this idea that forms the fascinating core of this book. What happens to our sun over millions of years? What happens to the rest of the solar system? How might we humans deal with or make use of the anomalous passing of time? Such vast themes might seem cold an impersonal but for the Coupland-style human relationships Wilson puts into his story.

Highly recommended.