Pat Cadigan

A wild, lyrical, unforgettable classic. I have no idea how this never got on my radar until now. There is something here that is more than just a genre novel, a poem, some other thing that communicates a feeling, an impression of the same hallucinatory effect the characters themselves are experiencing. I did not appreciate while in the midst of the book some of the non sequiturs, the random lyrics and images, out of place phrases, the lack of many concrete environmental descriptions. But by show more the end the tapestry weaves back together and all those strands and odd details come back and provide an almost shocking sense of unity to the entire narrative. A hypnotic ride through a fully realized cyberpunk world, with a payoff worthy of the journey. show less

Cyberpunk.

Is it all pretty much a mess wrapped up with mirror shades and spinal shunts, hacking and guns?

NOT this one!

Well, it was pretty much a mess of characters and mediots for more than half the novel and I'll be honest, I was rather mystified and wondering where the novel was going or whether it WAS going anywhere. It felt like a random number generator approach to novelization. We had a bunch of friends all interconnected on the media-train in all different positions or outside of show more the corporate loop, and most of it was fairly interesting in and of itself, but then I kept asking myself... Where is this going? It felt like a discovery novel. As in, the author is throwing out everything and she's just gonna get there when she gets there.

Which is fine, but I truly had to wonder. As a coherency thing, I got through something like 70% of the novel and I was CERTAIN that I was going to give it a 2 star rating. I was SO over it. I didn't like it. I didn't care.

So what happened?

Well, apparently, Cadigan pulled one hell of a magic trick on us, or she just poured over her text with a VERY fine comb in prep for the rewrite and then just produced GENIUS, wrapping up all these character threads into something really freaking amazing for the last 30% of the novel.

Total vindication.

All those bits and pieces came shining out of the page and turned this hot mess of a novel into something profound, technologically awesome, and strange.

I wouldn't say that I'd like to read this again anytime soon, perhaps, because it was something of a chore, but the satisfaction quotient is WAY up there. She knows how to pull of ENDINGS. Wow.

This was the dark horse of all novels. :)

And it turned out pretty punk-ish by the end, too, but no guns. It's a nice change for the genre. :) show less

Good cyberpunk by and about women, which is a refreshing change of perspective from a very male dominated sub-genre.
Fair warning to crunchy cyberpunk fans, this deals almost exclusively with artificial reality and the nature of our perception of reality self, to the detriment if not outright exclusion of many of the genre's other tropes. I would say a good three quarters of this novel takes place within various 'layers' of artificial reality. A concept treated in an interesting, almost show more spiritual, sense.
Good enough of a read that I'll pick up the sequel. show less

Yes this hasn't dated incredibly well in parts but the idea of a virus that causes strokes with people connected with a network is interesting and a logical offshoot of what could happen if someone hooks someone else up to a network without all the safety precautions. And while some of the tech has dated some of the concepts and ideas are still fresh.
Sadly I think this would have sung to me if I had read it along with the other Cyberpunk books and while playing Cyberpunk the roleplaying game show more regularly, but it fell flat for me. show less