Glasshouse

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/review/R2BMTY271UEHXV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

The time is hundreds of years into the post-human future. Our present era is one of the “dark ages,” cloaked in mystery because data preservations techniques were changing so much between 1950 and 2050 that nothing of value was stored in a durable media. Society is dependant on “A-Gates” that can assemble anything through nanotechnology and “T-Gates” that can take anything anywhere through wormholes. No one dies permanently anymore because personality and memories can be stored and recreated.

Robin is recovering from a self-prescribed memory wipe surgery. He takes up with the four-armed Kay. He is being threatened by something in his forgotten past. They decide to enter an experiment that will cut them off from the universe for one-hundred “megasecs,” which is about three years.

Once in the experiment, Robin finds himself in a puny female body and he can't identify Kay. He also discovers that the experiment has reproduced a society that incorporates the gender rules of the 1950s and the experimenters have rigged a punishment and reward scoring system to enforce the rules.

I found the first half of the book tiring and irritating. Basically, it seemed to be an opportunity for satirizing gender roles based on a strawman caricature. Worse, the previously male Robin seemed to be stereotypically female, acting in ways that wouldn't seem to be typical of a male or even a person where gender roles had been eliminated by gender-swapping technology. Likewise, the other former denizens of post-human society seemed to become something like high school girls. It seemed weird and not very persuasive.

On the other hand, at some point, the book shifted into high gear as a high-tech spy thriller. We learned a lot about how the paradise of post-human high technology is actually very capable of dehumanized horror. These aspects of the story were what sold the book to me, raising my score from three stars to four stars.

Ultimately, after a choppy start, I enjoyed this book's energy and vision.