Tea from an Empty Cup (1998)

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0812541979, Paperback)

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