Just finished Glasshouse, it’s a good read, considerably more mature and developed than Atrocity Archives. It presents yet another alternative future-society vision, this time based on pervasive wormhole and quantum-scale manipulation technology, but with the same emphasis on current-day IT nomenclature as Atrocity. Lots of references to boot-strapping, firewalls and viiri. It still has the JMS/Neal Stephenson issue of struggling to resolve all the cool ideas into a coherent conclusion in the final chapter, but that’s forgivable, in the same way as Snow Crash was a huge improvement over the highly confuse Diamond Age ending.
It’s probably those most Culture-y non-Culture novel I’ve read in a while, with pervasive AI and many other post-human evolutions, and tends to reinforce how coherent the Culture universe is, comparatively speaking. Next on the reading list is Matter, hopefully it’s a good one.
