SEMIOPUNK (39)

By: Joshua Glenn
November 2, 2025

An irregular, ongoing series of posts dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.”

GLASSHOUSE

“When people ask me what I did during the war, I tell them I used to be a tank regiment. Or maybe I was a counter-intelligence agent,” explains our protagonist, Robin. “I’m not exactly sure: my memory isn’t what it used to be.”

In Charles Stross’s Glasshouse (2006) Robin, a body-swapping soldier who has just emerged from what he’s informed was a much-needed course of memory excision, starts a romantic relationship with Kay, another memory-altered human. It’s the twenty-seventh century, and we find ourselves in the Invisible Republic — a splinter “polity” (a city-state in space, linked to other polities by wormhole gates) recovering from the Censorship Wars. Which involved molecular-reconstructing “gates” that — having been infected by a virus — started altering people’s understanding of civilization itself. Also, network worms like “Curious Yellow” delete historical records and collective memories. Robin, it seems, played a crucial role in freeing humanity from this virus… which is why he’s now being targeted for assassination.

Prioritizing safety over liberty, which is his first mistake, Robin allows himself to be persuaded to take part in a three-year social experiment that will assign him a new identity and body, then place him into what is supposed to be an accurate simulation of Euro-American society during humankind’s Dark Ages, i.e., the all but forgotten mid-twentieth through early twenty-first century here on Earth. Within this simulation, the participants are constantly surveilled. The goal of the experiment, or so Robin is led to believe, is to examine how the society of the 20th century worked, and to help the experiment’s participants form a new community and escape their pasts.

As a housewife, now named Reeve, our protagonist encounters the sexism and cultural conformity that humankind will have evolved beyond by her own time. (A posthuman being used to readily changing their body and resetting their memory, forced to conform to the restrictive, culturally primitive norms of our own era — now that’s a fun concept to explore.) It’s enjoyable, at first, watching Reeve encounter what is supposed to be a version of our own recent past and present — particularly because the experiment gets so many of the details wrong. The gamification of this large-scale LARPing exercise is also intriguing; one gets “points” (and therefore, status and privilege) for conforming to certain norms.

However, Robin’s memories begin to trouble Reeve. Which eventually leads her to wonder: What’s the true purpose of this “glasshouse” (19th-century British slang for a glass-roofed military detention barracks based in Aldershot — which is to say, a Foucaludian panopticon)? And what did Reeve/Robin formerly know that makes her/him so dangerous?

Semioticians living through humankind’s hard-right turn, here in the 2020s, are well-placed to understand and bear witness to the sort of cognitive dictatorship on display in Glasshouse. Historical records are being deleted; collective memories are being altered. The resulting amnesia makes it impossible for people to know the true history of our social and cultural conflicts or the motives behind them, leaving us in a state of historical subjugation.

We are also witnessing a return to enforced conformity and rigid gender roles. Robin/Reeve is subjected to Stepford Wives-like sociocultural pressure to conform to a conservative, nuclear-family model, with the goal of forcing out non-conforming traits. (Robin/Reeve and another participant, a man named Sam, are paired as a heterosexual couple to simulate life as a nuclear family.) Also — like Lo Lobey in Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection, about which I’ve written for this series — Robin/Reeve and Sam are gender-fluid beings forced to conform to rigid, highly restrictive 1950s-era gender roles and expectations. Bewildering! And worse than bewildering: In one scene, Robin/Reeve rescues a woman who’s been brutally assaulted by her husband, and she is only praised for doing so because the rescue saved the life of the woman’s fetus.

Also, why are all the women in this society fertile?

Artificial scarcity is another component of Robin/Reeve’s new context. In the twenty-seventh century, replicator technology has made scarcity obsolete. So the Glasshouse experiment artificially re-introduces it, forcing citizens into a system where one’s status depends on a partner’s salary, creating social hierarchies that didn’t previously exist.

The justification for the Glasshouse experiment? Its architects justify their control and surveillance by pointing to manufactured or exaggerated threats. Civil liberties are suspended; for this, rather than being outraged, the populace is grateful.

Glasshouse explores how social control can be achieved through memory manipulation and enforced conformity, rather than only through overt, militaristic displays of power. The experimenters are concerned to understand how memory and identity can be censored and controlled to create a compliant, authoritarian society. It’s an experiment about fascism… but is it a fascist experiment? Is the experiment run by benevolent social scientists or rogue war criminals intent on, if you will, making America great again?

Benito Mussolini once used the phrase “Fascism is a glass house” to promote the idea of a transparent and modern government, free from the perceived corruption of previous regimes. We know how that turned out.

A kick-ass soldier trapped in a midcentury suburban housewife’s form, Robin/Reeve must become a kind of semiotician. He/she must ask difficult questions about the taken-for-granted sociocultural forms and norms of the Glasshouse. And then, once he/she has puzzled things out to his/her satisfaction, he/she must recruit allies and take counter-measures.

In 2007, Glasshouse won the Prometheus Award, as well as being nominated for the Hugo, Campbell, and Locus Awards.

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SEMIOPUNK (39)

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