Synners

Description

In Synners, the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim. A constant stream of new technology spawns crime before it hits the streets; the human mind and the external landscape have fused to the point where any encounter with reality is incidental.

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Customer Reviews

Free SF Reader
It is interesting to see the language Cadigan was using in this book, circa 1990 : war porn, food porn, etc., being used in exactly the same way now.

A cyberpunk ahead of her time, for sure. Apart from that, an interesting tale of what happens when things go bad in a network sense, especially if you are too closely connected, particularly organically.

While her books never blow you away, it seems, she is consistently good, and real.

[...]

2007-09-03 | - Research Finished | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Like hot molten cliches oozing down a low-jack interface
Yeah and if you thought the review's title was ridiculous...

It's not so much that the book is confusing or that the characters could use a bit more depth, it's that from the get-go, the writing is cliche. Pat Cadigan, who hit a home run with Mind Players, tries way too hard to be -- captial "C" -- Cyberpunk in this book. It's possible that because I've only just read Synners while I read my first 'cyberpunk' book in the early 90s I've lost the ability to be impressed by attempts at 'hard edged' writing that tries to use slang like 'stone home' and 'hot-wire' to indicate a machine or drug centric society on the edge of destruction; but there's just so many sentences that seem oh so dutifully crafted to fit into what cyberpunk is Supposed To Be.

I give it two stars because underneath the cliche there are interesting ideas; it's just too bad one has to wade through so much over-eager writing to see them through.

If you really want to read an engaging book of speculative fiction by Pat Cadigan that bucks the cliches of cyberpunk and strikes out on its own read Mind Players.

2006-10-18 (CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 2

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excellent, highly complex, cyberpunk sci-fi
Pat Cadigan's "Synners" - excellent, highly complex, cyberpunk sci-fi by an author I now very much want to read more of. Perspective switches between different characters in different narratives and I'm sure I missed a lot by only reading this in bits interspersed with a lot of other things. Synners are those who take imagery from the brains of others and turn them into a consumable form through a new form of surgical cuber modules. The idea is similar to that I first saw in one of William Gibson's "Kings of Sleep", one of the short stories in the Burning chrome collection, or the performers with cybered creative skills in Joan D. Vinge's "Cat's Paw", but "Synners" takes the idea further, developing it into a complex plot with a sideline of studies in Self and Consciousness.

2006-09-21 | Semioticghost (London, UK) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Very, very confusing!
To tell you the truth, I couldn't make heads nor tails out of this book. The language is too far away from even modern, and the characters are confusing. I love sci-fi, even the new computer-oriented (some call it cyberpunk) stuff like "Snow Crash", but "Synners" is just strange. Ala the Emperor's New Clothes..."Oh my, how strange! It must be good!" No, sorry, it's just strange. I actually came here (to Amazon reviews) to see if anybody else had made sense of it. I thought I might read farther if I understood it better. I'm only to page 18, and I doubt I'll finish it.
Doug

2005-11-02 | Where's my pants? (Lancaster, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Universal themes in a sci-fi disguise
This was only the second cyberpunk novel I've ever read and I rather enjoyed it. Cadigan created truly believable characters. She showed that whether a person is "good" or "bad," that person is still human and has flaws. It was nice to see fictional, genius computer hackers with flaws. Today's culture seems to have a too high percentage of fictional computer hackers that are god-like perfect.

Cadigan also created a story that, while not impossible to put down, compels the reader to continue. She draws the reader in, shows them the pros and cons to a new technology, and leaves the rest to the reader, allowing the reader to decide its worth.

Even though the book has universal themes, I wouldn't recommend this to others that didn't read sci-fi. If you like sci-fi I would recommend giving this book a try. Keep in mind though that Cadigan doesn't give a thoroughly convincing argument to the technology's validity; I'm not sure that was her main focus.

2005-04-25 | Computer Geek (Manhattn, Kansas, United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Patterns

Description

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This collection of precyberpunk short stories was originally published in 1989, with some of the selections dating back to 1983. As a result, some of the stories may seem outdated, but they brilliantly illuminate how quickly technology has advanced in one short decade.

In Pat Cadigan's tales, social issues morph into monstrous fantasy--like the what happens to Milo, the kid who's always left out, in the chilling "Eenie, Meenie, Ipsateenie." The story "Heal" will keep the likes of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker awake at night, pale and unblinking in their beds. Particularly harrowing is the tale "My Brother's Keeper," in which a girl's struggle to rescue her brother from heroin addiction uncovers something far uglier going on in the dark recesses of the inner city.

Patterns is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's short stories, but with malevolent twists and psychotic turns that leave the reader waiting on tenterhooks for the final punch line. Fans of Cadigan's work will particularly enjoy the introductions she has written for each story. Those wanting to read her for the first time may find her novels a better introduction. --Jhana Bach

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Customer Reviews

The best in mid-80s short science fiction
Another first collection, Patterns collects almost half of Pat Cadigan's short fiction from the last ten years. Cadigan writes from the dark underbelly of society, and she usually works in the impact of technology on her characters. It was this style that placed her within the Cyberpunk movement at the time. But Patterns shows that Cadigan's fiction centers more on people--it is the characters you remember from these stories, their problems, their horrors, their hopes--not ideas.

My favorite story here is "Rock On," a tale of music and ownership, the trap of job and ability. Gina, a synner (synthesizer), is on the run from her normal band, Man O'War. But Gina's problem is that she only knows how to syn, and that she loves it, even if she views it as a trap. Another author would have gone on to great detail about living synthesizers, yet Cadigan's focus is on Gina and her addiction/loathe for the job that she does so well. "Rock On" goes beyond any future punk posturings; instead, it is a metaphor for the last decades--caught in our good intentions, we are slaves to our livelihoods. (Cadigan's novel Synners is an expansion of this story.)

Then there's Martha, a businesswoman on her first trip to New Orleans in "It Was the Heat." Caught between being just one of the guys and herself, Martha's carefully created working mother persona melts under the hot sun, and she discovers that control is a delicate thing. And China in "My Brother's Keeper," the big sister from college who receives a goodbye postcard from younger brother Joe, the heroin user. She rushes back to save him, but finds that she needs to save herself.

As indicated above, Cadigan gives us the much needed female perspective in science fiction, and her style is such that it doesn't alienate male readers. If only more male writers could do the same for their female readers, science fiction could become the exciting prospect that was the hope of the cyberpunks. Until then, we should thank god that Cadigan is around to show what life, and literature, could be like. This collection is only recently available as a paperback (before it could only be had in an expensive small press edition); buy it now before it is out of print again.

2002-08-26 | www.engel-cox.org (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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excellent
You can't describe this collection of stories. They are all
magnificent. Buy this book.

2002-05-31 | tdgulch (Pennsauken, New Jersey United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Fun to read
I don't mean fun in the normal sense of fun, of course. Theses are not what anyone would call fun stories by any stretch of the imagination.

They resemble the works of Bradbury or Dan Simmons. Normal everyday events, somehow out of kilter a bit, or taking that half step behind the everyday to show... something else.

Not quite as brooding as Simmons, and not quite as adjective happy as Bradbury. Somewhere in the middle.

Overall, well worth reading, but they don't seem to fit in any particular genre. A little like this, a little like that. Horror maybe. But they're much too subtle to be horror. At least the conventional kind of everyday horror.

2001-01-29 (Round Lake Beach, IL USA) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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It hurts so good!
With the stories in this collection, Ms.Cadigan calmly and methodically rips your beating heart from your chest and shows it to you. She puts it back, but it doesn't feel quite the same any more. My initial reaction to most of these stories was "Oh god - we should warn somebody!" but then I remembered - it's only a story. Or is it? Pat Cadigan just keeps getting better and better!

2000-05-03 | consumer culture dropout (on the couch, covered with cats, reading a book) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Pat Cadigan the Queen of Cyberpunk
In this collection are some of the best cyberpunk stories around. It is good to see this book finally back in print. All will see why Pat Cadigan is a well respected writer of science fiction and in the sub genre cyberpunk. If you want to read good short stories with a bite, then Patterns is the book for you.

1999-04-11 | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Fools

Description

When Marva, a Method actress, awakens in a hologram pool, carrying in her head the memory of a murder, she must think fast to find out whose life she is living and to elude the Escort Service assassins who are pursuing her.

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Customer Reviews

Frightening Parable
In her first three novel-length forays into the world of cyberpunk, Pat Cadigan emerged with three distinct visions.

In her first novel, Mindplayers, she wrote a brilliant and deeply moving exposition of direct mind-to-mind contact in psychotherapy.

In her second novel, Synners, she produced an intricately plotted and fast-paced tale of corporate greed and governmental intrigue, underground resistance, and a threat to humanity's existence.

Now, in her third novel (actually a set of three closely-linked novellas), she has turned out a disturbing glimpse into a near-future struggle for human individuality.

In Fools, Ms. Cadigan plunges the reader in medias res into the mind of a young woman convinced of her being an actress who has franchised her personality to customers discontented with their own existence. Disconcertingly, she learns that the actress's acquaintances deny knowing her. To make matters worse, she recalls having killed someone or personal gain and somehow being connected with the hated Brain Police.

In the action flowing from the foregoing premise, our heroine, Marceline et al., risks her psychological integrity as she travels through her society's savage, schizoid underworld to bring justice to the victims of criminal mind-to-mind interlinks. Marceline et al. encounters/becomes/ceases to be an Escort who helps her clients kill no longer wanted personas, a memory junkie who gets high on parts of other personalities, and a mindsuck whose memories are illegally siphoned out of her for sale on the black market. On her mission she meets other pathological products of sociotechnological change, including a woman who turns the use of food into an unspeakable perversion. Throughout her odyssey Marceline et al. strives to answer a key question: "What are you but what you recall being?"

In conveying the immediacy of her heroine's experience, Ms. Cadigan has written one of the most complicated and challenging stories in sf's annals. Although she marks changes in viewpoint with changes of font, the reader will nonetheless need to pay close heed to every detail of the plot to follow its turns. (At one point the current viewpoint persona brings the complexity onstage as she thinks, "He was confused. I didn't blame him; I was starting to confuse myself.")

It is hard to imagine, though, how Ms. Cadigan could have simplified her story and still made it the frightening parable that it is. Her future is peopled, not wiht rational human beings who choose technologies for considered ends, but with empty or addictive personalities helplessly transformed by runaway technology into despoilers of the world at large. Seeing the harm that such personalities can cause with presentday technology, who would deny that they might do worse with more powerful technologies to come? In a way, the last sentence of Fools is as chilling as the last four words of 1984.

2008-12-04 (Lexington, KY USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Confusing in Three Acts...
You start off with the main character. But she isn't the main character. She is one of the personalities within the main character. Or is she?
In a world of Brain Police, memory junkies, struggling actors and mind pirates a plot can get pretty twisted without help from the author. The story comes to us in three acts, three parts, which seem to be linked by the same main character. But with the switching of memories and, at one point, of bodies it makes it hard to truly understand what is going on. Maybe it is because this is a book set in a setting developed by an earlier book? Maybe if I read the earlier books or book, I will most likely understand what is going on? But in the end all I can say is I won't be reading anything else set in this world.

2007-08-07 (Alexandria, VA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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The cyberpunk equivalent of Sybil
The ending is what makes this book so satisfying. Fools is a novel about personality, how much is your own and how much is grafted on to you without your knowledge. Like Pat's other work, Fools is gritty and witty, pumped up on technology (high) and grifters (low). What she doesn't explore here--things like the actual workings of a mindplaying theatre group or the morality of being a Brain Police (shades of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly?)--just goes to show how much work and thought went into this book. It's a confusing book, kind of like reading Sybil except all the characters are multiple personalities. And it's the ending--the tying up of what (might have) went before into a coherent statement--that pushes this puppy to the top.

2002-09-05 | www.engel-cox.org (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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unreadable
The plot was so contorted I couldn't follow it. I want to be entertained by a book, not have a faceoff with it (and lose).

1999-05-23 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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A wonderful challenge
Tired of books that insult your intelligence? This book is a challenge which matches the best fiction (not just Si-Fi) in creative thinking. Once you think you've got it figured out, there isn't just a plot twist - the whole world view shifts. I think its one of the best books written recently.

1998-03-10 (NYC) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 5

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Tea From An Empty Cup

Description

"How can you drink tea from an empty cup?"

That ancient Zen riddle holds the key to a baffling mystery: a young man found with his throat slashed while locked alone in a virtual reality parlor.

The secret of this enigmatic death lies in an apocalyptic cyberspace shadow-world where nothing is certain, and even one's own identity can change in an instant.

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Two-time Arthur C. Clarke Award winner for Best Novel, Pat Cadigan is the Queen of Cyberpunk for the brilliance of her ideas, the genius of her near-future extrapolations, and the beauty of her writing. No one else has explored and illuminated the mind-machine interface with the keen and relentless intelligence she demonstrates in her novels Mindplayers, Synners, Fools, and the long-awaited Tea from an Empty Cup. Her fourth novel is a perceptive, fascinating, witty SF mystery of artificial reality, whose paradoxical name perfectly defines its nature: an immaterial world of pure sensation, where, by legal mandate, everything is permitted and nothing is forbidden.

The hazards of Artificial Reality are spilling into the real world--people vanish and solitary gamers are found slain in sealed AR booths. The young woman Yuki, child of a Japan destroyed before her birth, enters AR as the new assistant to the mysterious celebrity Joy Flower, but with her own agenda: to find Tom Iguchi, her missing beloved, who never was her lover but had been one of Joy's Boyz. The hard-boiled homicide detective Dore Konstantin stalks the virtual streets of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty seeking a serial killer who may have murdered eight gamers from inside AR itself. But how do you find missing or hidden persons in a world where nothing is as it seems? The two plot lines subtly converge as fact and fantasy, murderer and victim, as well as understanding and identity invert in a virtual universe where the dangers are real and ever-present, and you can be anything or anyone but yourself. --Cynthia Ward

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Customer Reviews

Good, Just Not Great
I thoroughly enjoy reading Cyberpunk / Sci-Fi, as well as Modern and Classic Literature, and Mysteries - and with that said, I liked "Tea From An Empty Cup". I received it as a requested gift for Xmas. It was certainly not as great to me as "Snow Crash" or "Neuromancer", but nonetheless, good. If you're a Cyberpunk purist, you may dislike this novel because it mixes a somewhat-noir mystery into a cyberpunk world, but I enjoyed that. However, the soliloquies / inner dialogues of the protagonists in each story were ackward and not believable.

2008-02-23 (CA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Virtual murder mystery that is more accessible than her earlier books
The speculative fiction of the 1980s and the early 1990s by and large treated Japan as an economic powerhouse that threatened to subsume the United States and Europe -- mirroring, unsurprisingly, the view that prevailed in the culture at large. Japanese companies outperformed their American counterparts in the marketplace, at times even buying up their flailing and failing rivals. Cultural icons such as Rockefeller Center became Japanese property. The Japanese economy was booming, while Europe and the United States struggled in the aftermath of funding the defense systems of the Cold War. From William Gibson's Neuromancer to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the clear assumption was that the future belonged to Japan.

In the latter part of the 1990s, things have changed: the United States is riding an unprecedented wave of prosperity while Japan is caught in a financial crisis that covers the whole Pacific Rim. Speculative fiction has responded (as it should) to these altered circumstances, nowhere more clearly than in Pat Cadigan's new novel, Tea from an Empty Cup, an expansion and grafting-together of two earlier stories about the future of Japan which were originally published on OMNI Online. Instead of the Rising Sun, Cadigan shows us a Japan where the sun has set on its glory days.

The plot of Tea from an Empty Cup centers on the murder of an anonymous Artificial Reality (AR) junky and its investigation by policewoman Dore Konstantin. The victim, whose throat has been cut from ear to ear, was accessing the AR at the time of his death -- and was being murdered there as well. Everyone knows, of course, that what occurs in AR cannot affect the real world, but Konstantin is starting to wonder: Rumors of similar AR deaths have been circulating that indicate something unusual is going on. Intermixed with Konstantin's investigation (which occurs in numbered chapters under the title of "Death in the Promised Land") is a second storyline, a search for the missing Tomoyuki Iguchi by his friend (and would-be lover) Yuki, told in chapters under the heading of "Empty Cup." Yuki fears that Tom has become one of the many lost Joyz Boyz, young men who exchange their bodies for high-speed AR access.

The hunt for friend and murderer by Yuki and Konstantin spiral around each other as they each pursue their searches into post-apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, an AR that promises fun for all, as long as you have the resources to pay for it. Survival in AR requires a mental dexterity that can easily drive someone insane, and neither woman is particularly adept at navigating the make-believe world. Both must learn how to survive in this new setting before they can make progress on their quests. It is in the heady rush to the end, as the stories spiral around each other faster and faster, like water down the drain, that the novel is at its weakest, for Cadigan's prose becomes more and more concise and we lose some of the depth of the setting and characters that has been established earlier.

Tea from an Empty Cup is less densely layered than Cadigan's previous novels Fools and Synners, but it is filled with the same streetwise characters who know that, when it comes to technology, "the street finds its own uses." Cadigan's characters are the ultimate cynics and pessimists, who are nevertheless still surprised when their dim worldview is validated. In this way, Cadigan's cyberpunk (for this is the subgenre of which she is queen) is different from that of her male counterparts, most of whose visions of the future are equally bleak but whose characters lack this quality of surprisability. Yuki and Konstantin are hardened to their world, but they are still human enough to hope for better. While the flash of Tea comes from the same elements as other cyberpunk novels, what makes the story resonate with the reader long after the last page is this vestigial morality in its characters, who are trying to maintain some dignity in a world that is being made before them.

2005-10-15 | www.engel-cox.org (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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Zen Meets Cyberpunk
If you can wrap your mind around Zen concepts you might want to check out TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP by Pat Cadigan, a short, but good, novel that takes a slightly Zen approach to the idea of virtual reality.

Virtual reality is here and it is cheap enough so that much of the population works just to live their lives in some of the virtual scenarios. One young man is found dead in a locked room where he was logged in. His throat was cut and there are no sharp objects in the room. A detective notices that a number of other similar deaths have occurred recently. Thus two quests are taken up as two women log in disguised as the young man and try to find out what he was doing and who he may have met. It is a strange world where things are more real than real. Sensations are heightened and rumors exist of a way out the other side. It is this world that the two women must navigate to find out what happened.

The switching viewpoints are a little more confusing that is usual but the future world is quite interesting. I like the melding of cyberpunk, virtual reality and Japanese philosophy. It blends well and offers a good backdrop for that rare commodity, the science-fiction mystery. I picked up the book to look at it and found myself hooked right away. A very entertaining read if you don't mind having your mind bent and limbered up a bit. Check it out.

2004-06-28 (Chicago, IL United States) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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Utter Tripe
Cyberspace is addictive, expensive and ultimately boring. Thanks for the newsflash.

With numerous typographical errors, undifferentiated cardboard characters, a murderously tedious whodunit and the most uninteresting rendition of cyberpunk in a decade, Cadigan has achieved a new low in modern science fiction.

Would have been more appropriately titled, Words from an Empty Book (and even that sounds more interesting than this book ends up being).

2003-05-19 | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 1

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Good fun book for cyberpunk fans
This the first book of Pat Cadigan's I've read. I can't remember who or where I heard about it, but a good book.

The novel is set in a near future cyberpunk world where artifcial reality (AR) is commonplace and people regularly fall into lives in AR that are more compelling that lives in the real world. The technology is believeable with enough details to satisfy hard sci-fi readers without delving into textbookese.

Having enjoyed the proto-ARs that are online games, I was interested in seeing what Ms. Cadigan had to say about the future.

Similiar to Gibson's Pattern Recognition, all the characters in the book are looking for something. The focus is on the role of artifical reality in these hunts. The vision is interesting, but in the end it is difficult to relate to reality.

The book is fun and enjoyable as a quick read, but for more heady cyberpunk, turn to Bruce Sterling.

2003-04-19 (South Pasadena, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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SYNNERS

Description

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The Ultimate Cyberpunk

Description

In The Ultimate Cyberpunk, editor Pat Cadigan takes readers through the evolution of this influential science fiction genre, from the groundbreaking forefathers of the field such as Alfred Bester and Philip K. Dick, to the founding members of the cyberpunk movement, such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and forward through such innovators as Lewis Shiner and Rudy Rucker.

In this special collection, Cadigan presents the cyberpunk world, in which reality and virtual reality intersect. The growing impact of the Internet on our sense of community, the seduction of a world behind the screen, and the inherent dangers of a society in which any information can be hacked, stolen, and sold are some of the topics explored by our best cyberpunk writers.

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Customer Reviews

Some great tales, but a bad collection
I'm not sure why Pat Cadigan decided to edit yet another short story collection of cyberpunk and proto-cyberpunk. It certainly doesn't quite live up to the excellent literary quality found in the definitive collection "Mirrorshades" edited by Bruce Sterling or in William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" (Cadigan's collection reprints two stories from that volume, most notably the title story itself.). Nor does it try to explain exactly what the cyberpunk movement is or the origins behind it (For that, you should start with Larry McCaffrey's excellent edited volume of essays and short fiction, "Storming the Reality Studio".). But to her credit, she offers excellent fiction from the usual suspects, most notably Gibson, Sterling, Shirley and of course, herself. Notably absent is excellent short fiction from the likes of James Patrick Kelly, Neal Stephenson, Tom Maddox, or excerpts from the late George Alec Effinger's last notable body of work, a cyberpunk saga set in a politically resurgent Islamic Middle East. If you're interested in seeing some familiar examples of short cyberpunk fiction, then buy Cadigan's book. Otherwise, you're better off sticking with Sterling's anthologies and of course, Gibson's "Burning Chrome".

2005-04-30 (New York, NY USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Excellent examples of cyberpunk
This book's cyberpunk stories from the masters to the newest makes one appreciate such complete books in this high tech genre of science fiction as: "Mona Lisa Overdrive", "Neuromancer", "Cryptonomicon", "Snow Crash", "Cyber Hunter", and many more.

2004-06-29 (Ohio) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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Nothing Useful Here
I thought about titling this review "Nothing New Here," but soon realized that I'd spend too much time defending the word choice. Of course there's nothing new in the book, it's an anthology. What I mean is that there is nothing to be gained from this book that cannot be gained from mirrorshades or any other Cyberpunk fiction collections that were released during the height of the movement in the mid to late 1980s.

My original review of the book mysteriously vanished. Here it is, resubmitted in hopes that it will remain this time.
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Pat Cadigan has developed a respectably lengthy body of work in the science fiction genre. She gained fame through her association with the Cyberpunk literary Movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. Despite her obvious involvement, she writes in her introduction to The Ultimate Cyberpunk that she is simply an "end-user" of the genre. This statement does little other than to nullify her authoritative claim in regard to selecting pieces for the anthology. Another curious observation she makes is that she feels that those who were in the "tribe" of the Cyberpunk Movement (hereafter CM) were of the same generation. Alfred Bester and Cordwainer Smith, whose stories Cadigan selected to appear at the front of the anthology, wrote the vast majority of their work years before the CM was even a vision. In fact, Smith died in 1966, during the height of the "hard SF" era of Heinlein, Asimov and Niven. Cadigan even explains that Bester was a source of inspiration for the 1960s Science Fiction New Wave, which explicitly disables him from being a part of the CM, especially when he, like James Tiptree, Jr. (also included in the anthology) died in 1987, when the CM was at its zenith. I suppose it isn't so far fetched to include Philip K. Dick who was arguably the most important and best known science fiction author, outside of Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke. He was responsible for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), after all. But Dick died in 1982, never knowing what was to come in his wake. Furthermore, if Rudy Rucker was truly a member of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and John Shirley's generation, why, then has he been referred to as a Grandfather of Cyberpunk, not unlike Dick?

Cadigan perhaps anticipates remarks such as mine, creating an artificial group of defendants, who claim that "Cyberpunk itself is hardly anything new (Cadigan x)." It is here that she justifies her inclusion of Bester and Smith and the other previous era's authors. While this might satisfy some critics, it does not provide a strong enough reason for me. If she wanted to create an anthology of the stories leading up to and directly or indirectly causing the CM, then she should have done that. If she wanted to create a history of the CM, something which, 10 years removed from the end of the literary aspect, she could have done quite easily, she should have done so. She ought not to have tried to do both. She even makes mention of the fact that "there is no point in reprinting most of Mirrorshades," though she reprints both of John Shirley's and Lewis Shiner's pieces.

One selection she makes that I do agree with is Greg Bear's "Blood Music". I felt that the story showcased Bear's Cyberpunk leanings much better than "Petra" did, which was included in Mirrorshades. Sadly, none of the late George Alec Effinger's work makes it into the anthology. Of all the Cyberpunk and Cyberpunk era science fiction I have read, nothing speaks clearer to the aims of the movement as clearly and loudly as Effinger's Marid Audran trilogy. Sadly, Effinger never gained critical or peer acclaim, and some of the most well read science fiction fans wear a puzzled face at the mention of his name.

As with every CM anthology published to date, this book expectantly falls in line with the blatant fanaticism over the work of William Gibson. While Burning Chrome is a decent story, and one of the few actual pieces of Cyberpunk stuff in the collection, I was confused as to why only the second part of the Neuromancer graphic novel was published. The publisher, ibooks, could have probably secured the rights to publishing the other pieces. Instead, they leave those unfamiliar with Gibson's lackluster flagship title scratching their temples, and irritate the veteran fans of the genre by splintering the story.

The ibooks publishing house has made a living out of playing upon the nostalgia-storing areas of the brain, hiring second string authors to finish up manuscripts written by the masters, or to create stories based upon the universes of the science fiction grandmasters. The Ultimate Cyberpunk is no exception. It fails as both a documentation of a literary movement, and as a standard anthology, as the stories are too far apart in their publication dates to have any sense of unification.

There isn't any point in repackaging Mirrorshades, That's undeniably true. Unfortunately, that's exactly what Cadigan tried to do here tried to do, riding the coattails of the Internet and technology boom, while simultaneously creating one more outlet for her own stories and those of her pals, Sterling and Gibson.

2004-06-15 (Chicago, IL USA) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 3

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Good Stories, Bad Collection
Pat Cadigan has developed a respectably lengthy body of work in the science fiction genre. She gained fame through her association with the Cyberpunk literary Movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. Despite her obvious involvement, she writes in her introduction to The Ultimate Cyberpunk that she is simply an "end-user" of the genre. This statement does little other than to nullify her authoritative claim in regard to selecting pieces for the anthology. Another curious observation she makes is that she feels that those who were in the "tribe" of the Cyberpunk Movement (hereafter CM) were of the same generation. Alfred Bester and Cordwainer Smith, whose stories Cadigan selected to appear at the front of the anthology, wrote the vast majority of their work years before the CM was even a vision. In fact, Smith died in 1966, during the height of the "hard SF" era of Heinlein, Asimov and Niven. Cadigan even explains that Bester was a source of inspiration for the 1960s Science Fiction New Wave, which explicitly disables him from being a part of the CM, especially when he, like James Tiptree, Jr. (also included in the anthology) died in 1987, when the CM was at its zenith. I suppose it isn't so far fetched to include Philip K. Dick who was arguably the most important and best known science fiction author, outside of Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke. He was responsible for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), after all. But Dick died in 1982, never knowing what was to come in his wake. Furthermore, if Rudy Rucker was truly a member of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and John Shirley's generation, why, then has he been referred to as a Grandfather of Cyberpunk, not unlike Dick?

Cadigan perhaps anticipates remarks such as mine, creating an artificial group of defendants, who claim that "Cyberpunk itself is hardly anything new (Cadigan x)." It is here that she justifies her inclusion of Bester and Smith and the other previous era's authors. While this might satisfy some critics, it does not provide a strong enough reason for me. If she wanted to create an anthology of the stories leading up to and directly or indirectly causing the CM, then she should have done that. If she wanted to create a history of the CM, something which, 10 years removed from the end of the literary aspect, she could have done quite easily, she should have done so. She ought not to have tried to do both. She even makes mention of the fact that "there is no point in reprinting most of Mirrorshades," though she reprints both of John Shirley's and Lewis Shiner's pieces.

One selection she makes that I do agree with is Greg Bear's "Blood Music". I felt that the story showcased Bear's Cyberpunk leanings much better than "Petra" did, which was included in Mirrorshades. Sadly, none of the late George Alec Effinger's work makes it into the anthology. Of all the Cyberpunk and Cyberpunk era science fiction I have read, nothing speaks clearer to the aims of the movement as clearly and loudly as Effinger's Marid Audran trilogy. Sadly, Effinger never gained critical or peer acclaim, and some of the most well read science fiction fans wear a puzzled face at the mention of his name.

The ibooks publishing house has made a living out of playing upon the nostalgia-storing areas of the brain, hiring second string authors to finish up manuscripts written by the masters, or to create stories based upon the universes of the science fiction grandmasters. The Ultimate Cyberpunk is no exception. It fails as both a documentation of a literary movement, and as a standard anthology, as the stories are too far apart in their publication dates to have any sense of unification.

There isn't any point in repackaging Mirrorshades, That's undeniably true. Unfortunately, that's exactly what Cadigan tried to do here tried to do, riding the coattails of the Internet and technology boom, while simultaneously creating one more outlet for her own stories and those of her pals, Sterling and Gibson.

2003-08-21 (Minneapolis, MN, USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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Not strictly Cyberpunk, but a good read
Cadigan herself bemoans the "Ultimate" title of this book. But the stories inside are amazingly fresh, especially considering the copyright dates on some of them. I found it interesting to first, read the stories, and then turn to the beginning of the book to check the copyright date. The roots of the Cyberpunk literary movement are all here! I highly recommend it to true cyberfans.
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2003-01-20 | sgtbuk1 (Knoxville, TN United States) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 4

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