Subject: Re: Synners (REVIEW)

From: [email-masked]
Date: 18 Jan 91 22:56:44 GMT

Synners, by Pat Cadigan

[email-masked] (Johanna Draper) writes:

> I just found this book and picked it up, based mainly on the short story she
> wrote that was included in _Mirrorshades_.  I found it interesting and very
> much similar to/inspired by _Neuromancer_.  Anyone else have any opinions?

Well, since you asked.

The book has a gorgeous cover, and a gorgeous first thirty pages or
so as Cadigan introduces the background state of society.  After that
she gets into plot, characters, and dialog, none of which she handles
particularly well.  The dialog especially is terrible.  And the characters
are pretty much all stereotypes; hip stereotypes, but stereotypes
nonetheless.  None of them is alive enough to care about.  And the
plot...  Wait a minute, let me try to remember.  I read it a week ago
so I should be able to.

Oh, right.  There's a new scientific breakthrough, which lets you
interface directly between computers and people.  For some reason which I
forget, this is a Very Bad Thing, which an evil mega-corporation has taken
over and is going to market for (gasp) profit motives.  Meanwhile some of
our heroes have a copy of the data so the evil mega-corporation is after
them.  And the e.m-c. gets some rock video artist to start generating
virtual reality videos with this, and they have this hacker who's supposed
to be protecting them from the good guys, and some other guy who works for
them is about to lose his job because he spends all his time playing
with (crude, last year's model) virtual reality women, and then I think
the video artist dies and goes into the computer net ...

None of it seems to have much point, and it goes on and on forever.
At this point we're about a hundred and eighty pages into the book.
I skimmed the last 250 (Yes, that's right, this thing is 430 pages long)
so I may have cheated myself, but it certainly didn't seem to get any
better.  A definite "Must Avoid" rating.

Dan Bloch
[email-masked]