I’ve known Charlie Stross since about 1990. Steve Glover introduced us. When I first met him, I think he’d had one short story published in Interzone. He was struggling to become a fiction writer. A decade later and he’d made it into print numerous times in the major SF magazines (particularly Asimov’s) and finally got a book contract. I kept meaning to read some of his stuff, which we chatted about when we met at cons and elsewhere. When I went up to Edinburgh for the Computer Law World Conference last September, I met up with Charlie and his spouse Feorag. When I mentioned to Charlie that I really did intend to read some of his stuff real soon now (he’d sent me a copy of Accelerando in electronic form and asked me to see if I could spot any techno-gotchas, but I hadn’t had time) he very kindly supplied me with a full set of his books. I raced through them before Christmas and was mostly very impressed. His most recent SF (he also publishes a pseudo-fantasy series and a horror-detective series with different publishers) was Glasshouse, set in the same universe as Accelerando, which suffered as a novel from being a fix up of nine short stories in three groups of three. When it appeared on the short list for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, I figured I’d actually buy a copy of one of his books, and I ordered a copy from Amazon. I just read it. Read on for a review.

Imagine a world where you can be disassembled and reassembled by nano-machines. You can be copied, merged, have a mechanical body, a standard human body, or something weird that someone (or more likely some computer) designed. interstellar travel by means of deliberately targetted wormholes is relatively easy, and that solves energy requirements too, because you can open a tiny hole into a sun. That’s the universe in Glasshouse.

Charles Stross takes the conceptions of Drexler and Vinge and seamlessly produces a world we can just about understand from these concepts. Avoiding McLeod’s problem with AIs and Vinge’s problem of seeing past a singularity, he weaves the new problems of today (spam, computer viruses, DRM, copyright, censorship, thought control, religious fundamentalism) into an exciting thriller format. With nods to Philip K. Dick, Len Deighton and John Varley he takes us on a breathtaking roller-coaster of social and psychological upheaval, coupling the worst excesses of government and corporate greed of today with the nightmares (and dreams, and it’s sometime only a point of view as to which is which) of a possible future. Grounded in information theory and current physics speculation, believable humans, aliens and AIs populate a vast stage upon which is played out an all too human drama.

Stross has finally produced at novel length the promise he’s been showing for years in the short story format. If this doesn’t win this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, then one of the other nominees must be a doozy. This is easily the equal (or superior) of many of the winners of the past decade.