The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Glass Houses

Glass Houses book cover

Often, what I decide to read is heavily influenced by what kind of mood I'm in at the time. When I read Glass Houses, I was firmly in a creepy near-future, slightly sci-fi kind of mood, brought on by watching Severance season 2. I will say that this book definitely fulfills that mandate and then some.

The novel opens in a very Lost-esque fashion, with an automated jet crash-landing on a weird, seemingly uninhabited island. The passengers on the plane are the CEO and key employees of Wuv, a company that has just been acquired, which has made everyone on board exceedingly rich. Shortly after crashing on the island, the survivors find a fully automated black cube mansion, but they have no communication with the outside world—also very Lost-like.

The plot of the novel follows Kirsten Mara, the “Chief Emotional Officer” of Wuv, navigating surviving on the island interspersed with flashbacks of key life events leading to the acquisition of Wuv. Kristen is famous from a childhood incident where her family was killed effectively on an internet live stream by a fire that only she escaped from, yet left her seriously burned and scared. She is also a pioneer in the field of affective computing, which in the book is described as a system that can fully read a person’s emotional state and have it be read and understood by AI or other people using special software. Wuv is also looking to create a cryptocurrency-like system based on this tech, which is exactly as dystopian as it sounds. Affective computing does have a relatively long history in the real world, but thus far, no megacorps have sought to exploit it in the ways described in the book—at least not yet.

As the story progresses, we learn more and more about the CEO of Wuv, and exactly why the black cube mansion's smart systems seem to behave so oddly—like how it seemingly ignores women trying to use most of its features. Could the whole crash have been some kind of horribly executed team building exercise? The weird atmosphere and ever-increasing stakes definitely ticked all the Severance-adjacent boxes. If you are looking for something to fill the void until season 3, I think Glass Houses can do that for you, even if there is no Adam Scott around.