Glasshouse

Glasshouse is a science fiction novel by the British writer Charles Stross, first published in 2006.

It is set in the twenty-seventh century, when humanity has spread across the galaxy through wormhole technology and split into a great many separate societies. Robin is recovering from an operation that removed his memories, and the experiment he joins is meant to reconstruct the period everyone has agreed to stop thinking about: the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Dark Ages, so that the volunteers can find out why the people of that era behaved as they did. He arrives to learn that his new body belonged to a woman and that he will live inside the experiment as her, under the name Reeve.

In the re-creation, participants are given households, marriages, clothes and rules, and are expected to live as people lived then rather than as they do now. Reeve begins to suspect that the organisers have a purpose beyond research, and that the society being rebuilt is not a puzzle but a trap. Much of the book is about identity and conformity, and about what people will accept in order to be seen as normal.