It could also be a learning-to-have-faith-in-yourself story, and it *almost* is. It could be an action-film-on-the-page, but the two fight scenes that are clearly meant to be the story’s highlights come off flat and adrenlineless, as Mixon skips over large chunks of action in a sentence or two and fails to describe events with the precision and impact needed to make them live in a reader’s mind. It could be an exercise in world-building, exploring a world wracked by global warming, in which access to climate control is class-based and people go outside as little as they can, but the worldbuilding aspects barely go deeper than the cosmetic. It could be a mystery novel, noir/cyberpunk-style, but everyone’s motivations come clear in the first half of the book and there’s no whodunnit to wonder about. There’s a lot that *could* happen in this novel, but little of it does. Cue the countdown as she, inevitably, has to figure out who *else* wants these items and how she can survive having stolen them. She tries to rescue him and fails, but she *does* manage to steal his jewelry and a sealed envelope he was carrying. As the novel opens, Ruby discovers a rich old man trapped in a tottering skyscraper in the middle of a hurricane. Waldoes are robots that can be controlled at a distance by the minds of their operators Ruby uses her waldoes to scavenge and salvage, recovering loot from abandoned buildings for clients. In a near-future world suffering from global warming, down-on-her-luck techie Ruby operates waldoes for a living.
At just over 200 pages, it has an extremely simple story to tell, and it tells it without a single surprise. Unfortunately, “Glass Houses” is very straightforward. As a sometimes cyberpunk and noir fan, I was looking forward to reading this revelation for the genre. Cadora’s article “Feminist Cyberpunk.” Cadora, author of the novella “Stardust Bound” (which I recommend), argued that, in “Glass Houses,” Mixon translates the tropes of cyberpunk out of a male-only worldview into a wider, more equitable worldview.
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