Glasshouse

Acknowledgments

Thanks due to: James Nicoll, Robert "Nojay" Sneddon, Cory Doctorow, Andrew J. Wilson, Caitlin Blasdell, David Clements, Sean Eric Fagan, Farah Mendlesohn, Ken MacLeod, Juliet McKenna, and all the usual suspects.

"This apparatus," said the Officer, grasping a connecting rod and leaning against it, "is our previous Commandant's invention. . . . Have you heard of our previous Commandant? No? Well, I'm not claiming too much when I say that the organization of the entire penal colony is his work. We, his friends, already knew at the time of his death that the administration of the colony was so self-contained that even if his successor had a thousand new plans in mind he would not be able to alter anything of the old plan, at least not for several years . . . It's a shame that you didn't know the old Commandant!"

—"In the Penal Colony," Frank Kafka

Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?

—Adolf Hitler, 1939