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Reading: Synners
Apr. 15th, 2018 07:07 pmPat Cadigan's Synners is a cyberpunk classic that I had no idea existed in my brief mid-90s cyberpunk phase (which mostly consisted of reading Neuromancer, hanging out on Usenet and thinking the embryonic internet was the Coolest Thing Ever). Unlike Neuromancer, which is basically a heist thriller, Synners is a novel about the interaction of technology and society, set in a near-future at the point where direct interfacing between the human brain and computers has just become possible.
It's a complicated book with a large number of point-of-view characters whose stories take a long time to even move towards intersecting; a lot of time is spent establishing the scene before much in the way of plot happens, a scene populated by a huge cast of hackers, rock stars, dropouts and media corporation drones and made harder to follow by Cadigan's use of invented slang* and blurred boundaries between reality, dream and VR. However, I found that it repaid the effort of reading it and, despite its age and the obvious disconnect between Cadigan's imagined future technology and the way current tech might plausibly develop (there are carphones and a kind of satnav, but no mobiles and portable cameras are still large and cumbersome), it felt as though it still had something to say about the vulnerability of a data-driven world. The characters felt very real and Cadigan made me care very much what happened to them, and the writing itself was compelling and almost poetic, making extensive use of repeated phrases and images in a way I found almost hyponotic. I'm not entirely sure I really understood what was supposed to be going on, but I did enjoy it.
* and also, in my copy at least, by fairly frequent OCR errors. Or at least, I think that the persistent use of "land" where context suggested the word "kind" would have been more appropriate was an OCR error and not invented slang, though I could be wrong.
It's a complicated book with a large number of point-of-view characters whose stories take a long time to even move towards intersecting; a lot of time is spent establishing the scene before much in the way of plot happens, a scene populated by a huge cast of hackers, rock stars, dropouts and media corporation drones and made harder to follow by Cadigan's use of invented slang* and blurred boundaries between reality, dream and VR. However, I found that it repaid the effort of reading it and, despite its age and the obvious disconnect between Cadigan's imagined future technology and the way current tech might plausibly develop (there are carphones and a kind of satnav, but no mobiles and portable cameras are still large and cumbersome), it felt as though it still had something to say about the vulnerability of a data-driven world. The characters felt very real and Cadigan made me care very much what happened to them, and the writing itself was compelling and almost poetic, making extensive use of repeated phrases and images in a way I found almost hyponotic. I'm not entirely sure I really understood what was supposed to be going on, but I did enjoy it.
* and also, in my copy at least, by fairly frequent OCR errors. Or at least, I think that the persistent use of "land" where context suggested the word "kind" would have been more appropriate was an OCR error and not invented slang, though I could be wrong.
