Synners

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

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 regularly, but it fell flat for me.

I came late to this seminal text of hard-core cyberpunk, which was perhaps a shame. Written in 1991, the technology is now quite outdated, as is the social landscape it exists within. Hip kids unsling laptops from their shoulders to get down to some serious hacking before heading off to a hit-and-run rave. Still, the relationship people have with their tech is quite prescient, as is the corporate skulduggery in attempting to monetise the new technology and how it all goes badly wrong.

Where this novel suffers is in the structure. For about the first half of the book, we keep switching pov character, and there appears to be around twelve such characters, with little to distinguish one from another, plus various walk-on others. Plot show more attrition does reduce this a bit, but when a character I didn't recognise got namechecked around page 405 - in the middle of the denouement - I couldn't tell if this was someone who'd been namechecked already or a genuinely new name. And I found myself empathising with one character, a middle-ranking executive, only to find by the time the plot kicked in, that he was not actually one of the Good Guys. We're not helped by Cadigan not naming the pov character in new chapters until we're a couple of pages in.

Yet once the plot takes off, about half-way in, events move slickly towards a crisis and then a resolution, as a rogue AI gets loose in the datasphere. And I found that a lot of events in the first half of the book fell into place in the second half. But I do wonder how many people would have lasted that long.

One of the other things that saves the book is the language, which is accomplished enough to keep me reading through the difficult bits. And there are occasional flashes of humour which are welcome relief to all the weirdness going on.

Possibly a book which would benefit from a re-read. show less

For someone who isn't great with computers, I've read a decent number of cyberpunk novels. Pat Cadigan's prose isn't quite as slick as Gibson's, but it is more accessible than Stephenson's. She's funny and clever. I'll admit, I spent at least the first third of the novel trying to figure out who everyone was and what the heck was going on, but it was brilliant once I did. What really got me were the similarities between the "dataline" and Facebook (and other apps)--the way information is fed through the newsfeed and how it is being monetized. I also dug the notion of a "synner" as someone who synthesizes.

Boring. Muddy multiple viewpoints. It's been fodder for queer and post human theorists as Cadigan has a stated feminist politics and there are, mostly elliptical, references to a gay relationship between two of the characters (maybe the only one in cyberpunk?). The relationship between Keely, a hacker (but of course!), and his boyfriend, Jones, who is addicted to killing himself and being revived by a set of electrical and hormonal implants was the only thing I cared about when I read the book. I would bookmark the segments from Keely's POV (Jones is conspicuously absent from the novel) and read those through as almost a short story, skipping over the rest. Plus, the corporate captivity and forced drugging he undergoes after a major show more hack backfires and he gets placed in corporate-supervised "probation" was very spicy to me at 15.

On a closing note, "Art" the rock and roller who comes to exist only in the virtual world and who helps the other characters by causing digital havoc is pretty much Russel Brand only more earnest....so, you know, the book's what-does-it-mean-to-be-human philosophizing is totally hard to take seriously. show less

The most remarkable thing about Synners was that I was only very occasionally reminded that it was published in 1991. It's not a perfect prediction of the cyberpunk future, but it's still pretty damned close, and as a critique of the intersection of technology and capitalism, it's still pretty dead-on.

As a novel, I thought it was a little too unfocused to be perfect - there are a lot of characters, a lot of viewpoints, and a lot of meandering that doesn't really serve the plot. As a matter of fact, there is no clear plot until nearly halfway through the book, and I found it pretty heavy going until the last hundred pages. Once it picked up, it was perfectly serviceable, but it's a better example of fascinating worldbuilding than of pure show more storytelling. show less