Pluralistic: Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses' (13 Aug 2024)


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The cover of the Tor Books edition of Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses.'

Madeline Ashby's 'Glass Houses' (permalink)

Glass Houses – published today by Tor Books – is Madeline Ashby's terrifying technothriller: it's an internet-of-things haunted house story that perfectly captures (and skewers) toxic tech culture while also running a savage whodunnit plot that'll keep you guessing to the end:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765382924/glasshouses

Kristen is the "Chief Emotional Manager" for Wuv, a hot startup that has defined the new field of "affective computing," which is when a computer tells you what everyone else around you is really feeling, based on the irrepressible tells emitted by their bodies, voices and gadgets.

"Chief Emotional Manager" is just a cutesy tech euphemism for "chief of staff." The only person whose emotions Kristen really manages is Sumter Williams, the boyish billionaire CEO and founder of Wuv. Sumter hired Kirsten because they share a key developmental trait: both were orphaned at an early age and had to raise themselves in a media spotlight.

Both Sumter and Kristen had been in the spotlight even before their parents' deaths, though. Sumter was the focus of the intense attention that the children of celebrity billionaires always come in for. Kristen, though, was thrust into the spotlight by her parents: her prepper cryptocurrency hustling father, and her tradwife mother, whose livestreams of Kristen's childhood involved letting the audience vote everything from whether she'd get dessert after dinner to whether her mother should give her bangs.

Kristen's parents died the most Extremely Online death imaginable: a cryptocurrency price-spike sent her father's mining rigs into overdrive, and when they burst into flame, the IoT house system failed to alert him until it was too late. The fire left Kristen both alone and horribly burned, with scars over much of her body.

Managing Sumter through Wuv's tumultuous launch is hard work for Kristen, but at last, it's paid off. The company has been acquired, making Kristen – and all her coworkers on the founding core team – into instant millionaires. They're flying to a lavish celebration in an autonomous plane that Sumter chartered when the action begins: the plane has a malfunction and crashes into a desert island, killing all but ten of the Wuvvies.

As the survivors explore the island, they discover only one sign of human habitation: a huge, brutalist, featureless black glass house, which initially rebuffs all their efforts to enter it. But once they gain entry, they discover that the house is even harder to leave.

This is the setup for a haunted house story where the house seems to be an unknown billionaire prepper's IoT house of horrors. As the survivors of the crash suffer horrible injuries and deaths on the island, the remaining Wuvvies bolt themselves inside, setting up a locked-room whodunnit that runs in parallel.

This is a fantastic dramatic engine for Ashby's specialty: extremely pointed techno-criticism. The ensuing chapters, which flip back and forth between the story of Wuv's rise and rise to a top tech company, and the company's surviving staff being terrorized on a paradisaical tropical aisle, flesh out Ashby's speculation and the critique it embodies.

For example, there's the political culture of Ashby's future America. Wuv is a Canadian company, headquartered in Toronto, and we gradually come to understand that Canada is the beneficiary of an exodus of tech companies from the US following a kind of soft Christian Dominionist takeover (Kristen and Sumter often have to wrangle rules about whether women are allowed to enter the USA in the company of men they aren't married or related to).

The flashbacks to this America are beautifully and subtly drawn, especially the scenes in Vegas, which manages to still be Vegas, even amidst a kind of national, legally mandated Handmaid's Tale LARP. Ashby uses her futuristic speculation to illuminate the present, that standing wave where the past is becoming the future. Like everything in the shadows of a haunted house tale, this stuff will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.

I'm a big Madeline Ashby fan. I have the honor of having published her first story, when I was co-editing one of the Tesseracts anthologies of Canadian SF. I've read and really enjoyed every one of her books, but this one feels like a step change in Ashby's career, a leveling up to something even more haunting and brilliant than her impressive back catalog.

Madeline and I will be live at Chevalier's Books in LA on Aug 16 as part of her Glass Houses tour:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-madeline-ashbys-glass-houses-tickets-965286486867

Hey look at this (permalink)


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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Waldrop: 1954 was a GREAT time to be a kid http://www.infinitematrix.net/columns/waldrop/waldrop13.html

#15yrsago Seder for liberated robots https://web.archive.org/web/20090816092953/https://papersky.livejournal.com/443771.html

#15yrsago Adobe: Once you license software in France, you can only use it in French https://web.archive.org/web/20090814174633/http://www.mcelhearn.com/?p=670

#15yrsago Visualizing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/11/choose-your-own-adventure-most-likely-youll-die/

#15yrsago EVE Online creates exotic financial instrument to combat gold-farming https://web.archive.org/web/20090813113841/http://www.massively.com/2009/08/11/the-fight-against-rmt-in-eve-online/

#15yrsago Anti-health-care loon says Stephen Hawking wouldn’t stand a chance under British health care system https://web.archive.org/web/20090806222911/https://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=333933006516877

#5yrsago Imagineering In a Box: free instructional video series from Disney and Khan Academy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv7sBCHvBEA

#5yrsago Brazil’s highest court rules that Bolsonaro cannot use criminal investigations to harass Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/09/huge-victory-press-freedom-brazil-supreme-court-bars-bolsonaro-investigating-glenn

#5yrsago Donor maps show just how widespread Sanders’ support is https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/02/us/politics/2020-democratic-fundraising.html

#5yrsago Big Pharma’s origin: how the Chicago School and private equity shifted medicine’s focus from health to wealth https://newrepublic.com/article/149438/big-pharma-captured-one-percent

#5yrsago Adversarial Fashion: clothes designed to confuse license-plate readers https://adversarialfashion.com/collections/all

#1yrago The Sacklers woulda gotten away with it if it wasn't for those darned meddling feds https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 774 words (36898 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: AI's productivity theater https://craphound.com/news/2024/08/04/ais-productivity-theater/

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