Review of Glass Houses by Madeline Ashby

The comps given for this one are Severance, The White Lotus, and Black Mirror, and I have to agree: Glass Houses is a science-fiction thriller very much of its time. Madeline Ashby

Kristen’s childhood was spent as a subject of livestreaming by her parents—until they died in a house fire that left her badly burned. Now grown, Kristen is working for a tech startup pioneering “emotional currency” based on the blockchain. When a plane carrying her, her bosses, and some of her colleagues crashes on a remote island with a mysterious and implacable smart home on it, Kristen has the wherewithal to keep the survivors on task. Yet as the survivors start to go missing or turn up dead one by one, and the smart home acts strangely, it becomes clear that there is a killer among them.

Ashby structures the story into two interwoven chronologies, past and present. The flashback chapters are arguably more interesting. They provide an important window into Kristen’s life, with Ashby carefully curating the details she wants to feed you as she shapes your expectations and perceptions of Kristen and her coworkers. The chapters on the island are less fulfilling simply because it is hard for Ashby to accomplish much within each without moving the story too far along. As such, each island chapter is basically “a weird and bad thing happened and now we are slightly more freaked out than before” until the climax and all hell breaks loose. The flashback chapters, in contrast, offer a richer range of emotional depth.

Although nominally near future in its setting, Glass Houses could very well be fifteen minutes into the future. Everything that is science fiction is only barely—novel medical treatments, autonomous vehicles, etc. I could easily see a cryptobro announcing an emotional currency next week. At its core, of course, this is a novel that interrogates and undermines the techno-utopianism pioneered by the effective altruists whom Ashby deconstructs with Sumter, a self-proclaimed affective altruist. Sumter works precisely because he isn’t a parody. He isn’t a thinly veiled analogue of Elon, Mark, or any of the usual suspects—yet certainly he has traits similar to all of them.

Ashby does a delicate dance throughout the novel around sexism in tech. She’s always acknowledging it, from Kristen’s interview to her participation at conferences to her day-to-day microaggressions from Sumter, Mason, et al. At the same time, Ashby lays down patter to distract you from these elements. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that Glass Houses is ultimately a book about misogyny. Sumter at his Muskest is obsessed with making babies on Mars, a ludicrous and puerile fantasy that has nevertheless been adopted by so many real rich white men (who of course would neither be carrying nor caring for these children). Although Sumter is far from the only villain in this piece (this is a novel where everyone is a shitty person), he is the least sympathetic villain, and I think that says something. It also says something about Ashby’s writing, and her ability to thread the needle of Kristen’s viewpoint, that she still manages to make you sympathize with Sumter ever so slightly: like so many of his real-world ilk, he is a boy broken by masculinity into something resembling a monster of a man.

Alas, I wish Glass House’s critique of Big Tech was as trenchant as its feminist criticism. Mostly it’s just quips, and while Ashby’s prose is lithe and densely packed with information, there’s little actual substance. Much like Coupland’s jPod, this book feels more like an artistic riff on the absurdity of Big Tech than an actual critique of it. I don’t know if that is a bad thing per se, but it made the book on a whole less memorable and interesting for me.

In contrast, I found Ashby’s insistence on checking her Canadianness throughout the book to be very endearing!

As much as I love the feminist themes here, Glass Houses is ultimately a very short and paper-thin thriller. It was a fine distraction for me, and I think there are other readers out there who will get a lot more from it.