I'm very pleased to announce that my latest SF novel, "Glasshouse", is out now in hardcover from Ace. (Orbit aren't publishing a UK hardcover — if you want a British edition you'll need to wait until next March when it comes out in paperback.) You can order it from Amazon.com or find it in bookstores — Amazon won't ship it until Friday, but most shops will already have it on the shelves.
Publishers Weekly said:
The censorship wars -- during which the Curious Yellow virus devastated the network of wormhole gates connecting humanity across the cosmos -- are finally over at the start of Hugo-winner Stross's brilliant new novel, set in the same far-future universe as 2005's Accelerando. Robin is one of millions who have had a mind wipe, to forget wartime memories that are too painful -- or too dangerously inconvenient for someone else. To evade the enemies who don't think his mind wipe was enough, Robin volunteers to live in the experimental Glasshouse, a former prison for deranged war criminals that will recreate Earth's "dark ages" (c. 1950-2040). Entering the community as a female, Robin is initially appalled by life as a suburban housewife, then he realizes the other participants are all either retired spies or soldiers. Worse yet, fragments of old memories return -- extremely dangerous in the Glasshouse, where the experimenters' intentions are as murky as Robin's grasp of his own identity. With nods to Kafka, James Tiptree and others, Stross's wry SF thriller satisfies on all levels, with memorable characters and enough brain-twisting extrapolation for five novels.
As if that's not enough, Kirkus Reviews had this to say in their starred review:
A perfectly tuned combination of gravitas and glee (the literary/cultural references are a blast). Stross's enthralling blend of action, extrapolation and analysis delivers surprise after surprise.
And here's what SFreviews.net said:
This Glasshouse isn't just glass. It's a prism that Charles Stross uses to split his storytelling into all of its component narrative colors — suspense, action, satire. It may be his best book yet. It's his most consistently suspenseful, and his funniest. It's got the trenchant humor of The Family Trade gene-spliced to the thrillaminute pacing of Iron Sunrise. It's set far into the same future as his wildly praised (except by yours truly) Accelerando. But whereas Accelerando seemed to strip-mine its future of humanity, and came across to me as cold and uninviting, Glasshouse presents its posthuman "network civilizations" as a never-ending Willy Wonka factory of phantasmagorical technowonders, as frightening as it is exhilarating.
Go on, buy the book so I don't have to sell my kidneys for a living. Please?
