review: Glass Houses (LJ Mixon)
Squish
Sept 1993
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"Glass Houses" (1992) by Laura J. Mixon (216 pgs)
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back cover:
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"Ruby runs waldos. Freelance. Construction, security -- no
job too large or small. And her favorite tool is Golem, six hundred
pounds of vaguely human shaped, remote-operated power. Not an easy
living, but it's better than most in half-sunken, greenhouse-heated
21-century New York. Best of all, the waldos go Outside, not Ruby.
Ruby hates the Outside.
But when Ruby/Golem tries to rescue a rich Egyptian from a
collapsing skyscraper, and accepts the papers he presses onto her as he
dies, Ruby's in trouble. She may have to go outside for real.
All of which might be a lot easier if she hadn't stolen the
diamonds off his body..."
opening sentence:
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Chapter 1: We Play Jungle Jim
"Getting Golem up the support structure was slow work at with
the winds at gale speeds."
no-spoiler-plot-summary
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Well, it's a mystery, so I really can't say a whole lot without
giving bits and pieces away, so I'll generalize. Ruby does lots of
exploring and tailing and detective work with her golems, through the
Net, and talks to some old friends. She deals with cops, lovers, the
"envies", and her own fears and hangups. There's action, thought and
emotion.
Tak thoughts:
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First of all, I'm a BIG sucker for first person stories. I just
love 'em. That's one reason I always read the first few sentences of a
book. The back cover can make it sound really BAD, or at least not
really exciting, but a first person tale can make up for alot. I think
it's because they remind me of my favorite type of story, the
hard-boiled-detective narrating the adventure... "I'd never have guess
what dark secrets lay behind that friendly face..", or "I just knew it
was gonna be one of those days", that kind of stuff. The descriptive
chapter headings are great also. Here's a couple more: "Serious Shit,
continued", "I buy Junk", and "Jungle Jim Revisited". I love books
written with this kind of style and attitude.
Secondly, it's written about a little visited (in my experience)
area of cyberpunk, the set of people known as "riggers", "waldo
operators", or the ideas of telepresence in general. Ruby is a really
hardcore waldo operator, she is almost always dealing through waldos
and has several that she uses for different purposes, including one to
go shopping with. They have a nice gritty, greasy feel to them, as if
they were old tools coated in grime and gunk from ages of use. She is
continually fixing them, replacing parts, worrying about malfunctions,
and cannibalizing older waldos. The waldos seem to operate on a
"snap-on" principal, with different funtionality being just a modular
part away. I particularly like the "schwarzenegger arm" fitting that
she pops on for heavy work.
Other neat gadgets/concepts in this book are Jello-vision and a
strangely different view of the Net (virtu-nets) accessed through
Ruby's waldo interface implants via a "beanie". The Net access is
nothing really new, it just feels odd, perhaps because of the matter of
fact way that Mixon's Ruby accesses it. Now Jello-Net, or Jello-vision
(JV) is a strange concept. It's apparently the next step for TV, a
vaguely holographic concept. There are "faces in the jello", and an
advertisement for the virtu-nets portrays Jv as the poor-man's VR.
All in all, it is a wonderful book. It's got some clever technical
things to think about, a well thought out world background that doesn't
jump up and slap you in the face like some backdrops, and the people
have real lives and problems. I'll often judge how well I like a book
and its characters by their longevity in my mind after I read the
book. In this case, Ruby and her world have been with me ever since.
It's one of my favorites.
rating: (*****) 5/5 stars
ps: Thanks to Toni Emerson for pointing this book out to me...
%A Mixon, Laura J.
%T Glass Houses
%I TOR
%C New York
%D May 1992
%G ISBN 0-812-51918-3
%P 213 pp.
%O paperback, US$3.99
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Mark Takacs | "We are Microsoft. UNIX is irrelevant.
t...@hitl.washington.edu | OS/2 is irrelevant. Openness is futile.
HITLab - Seattle WA | Prepare to be assimilated." by p...@turing.org
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