5 March 2002

Glasshouses by Laura J. Mixon
Tor, New York, 1992
reviewed by Gwyneth Jones

Gwyneth Jones, writer and critic of science fiction and fantasy, has written more than 29 novels for teenagers, mostly using the pseudonym Ann Halam, and critically acclaimed SF novels for adults, notably the Aleutian Trilogy: White Queen (co-winner of the James Tiptree Memorial Award); North Wind and Phoenix Café. Her short story collection Seven Tales And A Fable won two World Fantasy Awards, and her critical writings and essays have appeared in many publications, including Nature, and New Scientist. This year's publications and honors include: the Richard Evans Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in SF, nomination for the Lanarkshire Teenage Fiction Award, nomination for the Lancashire Children's Book of The Year Award for the horror novel Don't Open Your Eyes (as Ann Halam). Jones also has stories in Dark Terrors Five and The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories By Women. Dr Franklin's Island (as Ann Halam) was published this year along with Bold As Love (as Gwyneth Jones), which is due out in August . Find out more about Bold As Love, (a dark fairytale set in near future England) at www.boldaslove.co.uk

The time is somewhere around the mid-21st century, the eastern seaboard of the US is being lashed by one of its usual ferocious tropical storms. In drowned South Manhattan, a funky down-market salvage robot by the name of 'Golem' struggles with dumb-animal courage against the wind, the rain, and the speeded-up dissolution of the Chase Manhattan Bank tower. 'Golem' is a metal monster inhabited by the awareness of a human 'beanhead,' a young woman named Ruby Kubick who lies jacked in and twitching up in Queens. The robot stumbles on a shipwrecked yachtsman. 'His' distant operator attempts a rescue. The tower falls, the rich man dies. The destitute scavenger who controls 'Golem' succumbs to an uncharacteristic spasm of greed. Ruby Kubick, with a secondhand brain web and a (usually) far from dodgy conscience, spends the rest of the story jacking into various gadgets, tangling with the super-rich, getting done down by her rotten girlfriend and generally regretting this night's work—in a cheerfully inventive, consistently entertaining greenhouse-future-thriller.

I'm beginning to suffer an allergic reaction to the phrase 'This is cyberpunk with a heart'. It affects me much the same way as an invocation of the 'great tradition of J R R Tolkien'. On the back of Laura Mixon's Glasshouses, however, the disclaimer makes some kind of sense. Glasshouses is a downright, unashamedly soppy story: an urban fairytale. The speed and severity of the climate change suggested has to be on the extreme edge of greenhouse-prediction (even if somebody did nuke 'the Antarctic ice sheet'). The colourful social changes that go with it are only casually sketched. But this economically collapsed heat-death city has the coherent, sentimental vibe of a Hollywood-Depression movie. It's a world of soup-kitchens (though nobody would want soup in these temperatures) and High Society, innocently cheek-by-jowl. It's a city where stark desperation stalks the poor, but where Constance Bennett and Cary Grant could go swanning around the slums in their slippery bright evening clothes, and be sure of meeting nothing more threatening than an over-familiar drunk. Mixon's underclass greenhouse dwellers are stuck for life (except for the ones caught up in the fairytale) in a nightmare existence, a heap of human roaches living in a steambath with faulty drains. But their response to the privileged in their cool glasshouses, is Hollywood-free of any serious resentment. Even the 'bad' poor people only hope to be bribed a little.

Sentiment of a more engaging order pervades the Mixon version of that classic cyberpunk trope, the human/machine interface. The long action sequences in which the waldoes are involved are tautly written, with a fascinating fusion between the human 'I' and the machine, which it informs as a hand informs a glove. However, there's more to this invention than the successful employment of neo-jargon. Ruby Kubick is foolishly in love with her worthless roommate, but her deepest emotional involvement is with the trio of mechanical shells (waldoes) into which she downloads her awareness for salvage work. The technical side of Ruby's relationship with the machines is vivid and detailed. But her feeling for them is equally important -a psychologically convincing twist on the couch-potato apotheosis of 'virtual reality'. In Ruby's world a 'beanhead' is a human rewired for remote operation of a robot, originally for industrial purposes. In private life (after you've been made redundant, for instance) downloading your awareness into a machine is more than a way to make a living. The soft-bodied vulnerable human stays safely unseen, (wrapped in her suitably womb-like 'squish couch'), while her metal mask interacts with the real world possessed of super-powers, immune from discomfort, and with complete emotional privacy. What more could any poverty-snared CRT-junkie ask? No wonder Ruby awards her giant salvage Golem and her twelve limbed mechanical spider 'selves' such an irrational degree of loving loyalty. And no wonder that the book's sole venture into 'real' virtual-reality falls strangely flat and dull.

How true it is that classic cyberpunk has no heart, I'm not sure. The writers concerned are evasive on the subject—sometimes explaining that (what are loosely known as) 'feelings', were deliberately scraped out of the text for aesthetic reasons; sometimes declaring that the sf public just wasn't used to the spectacle of unvarnished human motivation before the c-word revolution. Ruby Kubick is certainly full of heart. Nothing could be further from the affectless 'new human'. And nothing could be more removed from the chill revenge-fantasy than this cyberpunk adventure bizarrely fueled on pity. But, perhaps Glasshouses touches a realism that escaped the style-dictat of the rich mid eighties. Laura Mixon's novel is featherlight, its values are late-night TV; it would be wrong to overburden it with analysis.

However, like the British female cyberpunk-heir, Storm Constantine, Mixon seems to know or to remember what it's really like to be young, ignorant and desperate: to be both tough and powerless. Ruby Kubick, arguably, is the only person in the book. The rest are cyphers with the simplisitic motivation of Hollywood (the good friend, the bad landlord). But she's an accomplishment. Watch out for the neat way her real-life agoraphobia slips in on you; and for the ghost that cries in the night. Ruby's brush with the Secret Rulers Of The World is of no significance, or barely, to the Rulers or to herself. Her tabloid sympathy for the family problems of the super-rich is true to her youth and ignorance. Her significant confrontations are with her own self-image; and with slightly larger roaches in the human discard heap. On this level the sugar coating of sentiment is not mere decoration. Sentiment—friendship, loyalty, affection, courage—is as much the natural food of the poor as anger. And it may not have such an immediate kick, but it works out cheaper.

It works out cheaper for the rich too of course, if the poor can be contented with a handful of fairytales... qu'ils mangeant de brioche. Glasshouses bears comparison with Lisa Mason's Arachne and Pat Cadigan's Synners. It is far less ambitious in scope than either, with nothing to say about the philosophical meaning of human/machine interface, no suggestions to make about the politics of its dystopian future, no news about the world outside the story. Though this modesty is refreshing, perhaps it's because there's no mad attempt to explain everything, that Glasshouses does not have the air of an edifice that will last. However, Laura Mixon is already in this slight first novel a skillful and engaging writer: always fun to read and given to sly, unexpected touches of poetry. I want to know what comes next.

Note—Glasshouses was Mixon's first adult novel. She has four other novels out, and Burning The Ice is due from Tor Books in August 2002. Her web page is at www.digitalnoir.com/l/about.htm.