SYNNERS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Pat Cadigan | 496 pages | 01 Sep 2013 | Orion Publishing Co | 9780575119543 | English | London, United Kingdom Synners (Syntax and Semantics) at OSU The fancy rubble of the old Pan Pacific Auditorium had been hard alive and jumping by the time she made it, bangers and thrashers and the pickle stand in business while the hackers ran fooler loops on their laptops to confound surveillance. Before she could get a new line on him, the cops had come in and busted things up. She had almost sulked herself into a doze when most of the crowd that had been waiting ahead of her rose en masse to stand before the judge. Doctors never keep regular hours. I wish you people would perpetrate insurance fraud in some other jurisdiction. Like Mars. Gina sat forward, her fatigue momentarily forgotten. The litany of charges was boring enough: conspiracy to commit fraud, fraud, unnecessary implantation procedures — the usual for a clinic that put in implants under pretense of treating depression, seizures, and other brain dysfunctions. Just another feel-good mill, big fucking deal. She started to drift off. Her eyes snapped open. A murmur went through the courtroom, and somebody smothered a giggle. The judge waited and the court waited. Several long moments later the judge turned away from the monitor in disgust. Do not call. Her novels and short stories all share a common theme of exploring the relationship between the human mind and technology. She was educated at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in theater and the University of Kansas KU , where she studied science fiction and science fiction writing under author and editor Prof. James Gunn. Cadigan met her first husband Rufus Cadigan while in college; they divorced shortly after she graduated from KU in That same year Cadigan joined the convention committee for MidAmeriCon , the 34th World Science Fiction Convention being held in Kansas City , Missouri , over the Labor Day weekend; she served on the committee as the convention's guest liaison to writer guest of honor Robert A. Heinlein , while also working for fantasy writer Tom Reamy at his Nickelodeon Graphics typesetting and graphic design firm. In the late s and early s, she also edited the small press fantasy and science fiction magazines Chacal and later Shayol with her second husband, Arnie Fenner. Cadigan sold her first professional science fiction story in ; her success as an author encouraged her to become a full-time writer in She emigrated to London in the UK with her son Rob Fenner in , where she is married to her third husband, Christopher Fowler not to be confused with the author of the same name. She became a UK citizen in late Cadigan's first novel, Mindplayers , introduces what becomes the common theme to all her works: her stories blur the line between reality and perception by making the human mind a real, explorable place. Her second novel, Synners , expands upon the same theme; both feature a future where direct access to the mind via technology is possible. While her stories include many of the gritty, unvarnished characteristics of the cyberpunk genre, she further specializes in this exploration of the speculative relationship between technology and the perceptions of the human mind. Cadigan has won a number of awards. Clarke Award both in and for her novels Synners and Fools. Robert A. Heinlein in part dedicated his novel Friday to Cadigan after becoming her friend, following her being the guest liaison to him for the 34th Worldcon in Kansas City. Review: Synners by Pat Cadigan There's still a bit too much portability of executable code for realism, and a few magic programs are exempt from all the rules and start moving arbitrarily through the network, but there's at least a plot-driven explanation for some of that. Cadigan also handles corporations realistically rather than making them pure evil. They have stupid bureaucracies and want to make money in the cheapest way possible. They aren't out to destroy the world. Much of the plot revolves around an independent music video of a sort production group that gets bought out by a media conglomerate that's also working on a far more efficient and immersive neural interface, a scenario that sets up plenty of conflict without needing shadowy plots and government schemes. I found the thought of an advertising-focused corporation with direct neural access to the minds of consumers realistic and plenty creepy. The main downside of this book is that I found it rather hard to follow in places. The main characters were frequently high on a wide variety of drugs, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, and Cadigan spends a lot of time describing their altered perceptions. This rarely works well for me, and there's enough of it in Synners that it drags, particularly combined with the very similar scenes describing the visual experience of music. Not unlike Mark. Living through the quake and the postmillennial madness that had followed was one way to end up under a pier talking to your toes; taking some of the stuff available on the Mimosa was another. Sometimes she could almost let the f—ing burnout go ahead and flush himself down the rabbit hole in his brain. So she did another night on the Mimosa, poking into shacks and lean-tos, searching under piers, checking out the jammers and scaring off the Rude Boys, looking to take him home, hose him down, and detox him enough to get him through his corporate debut the day after tomorrow. Toxed to the red line, no doubt. Like any of them needed to play hit-and-run in the Fairfax wasteland. The fancy rubble of the old Pan Pacific Auditorium had been hard alive and jumping by the time she made it, bangers and thrashers and the pickle stand in business while the hackers ran fooler loops on their laptops to confound surveillance. Before she could get a new line on him, the cops had come in and busted things up. She had almost sulked herself into a doze when most of the crowd that had been waiting ahead of her rose en masse to stand before the judge. Doctors never keep regular hours. Cadigan's first novel, Mindplayers , introduces what becomes the common theme to all her works: her stories blur the line between reality and perception by making the human mind a real, explorable place. Her second novel, Synners , expands upon the same theme; both feature a future where direct access to the mind via technology is possible. While her stories include many of the gritty, unvarnished characteristics of the cyberpunk genre, she further specializes in this exploration of the speculative relationship between technology and the perceptions of the human mind. Cadigan has won a number of awards. Clarke Award both in and for her novels Synners and Fools. Robert A. Heinlein in part dedicated his novel Friday to Cadigan after becoming her friend, following her being the guest liaison to him for the 34th Worldcon in Kansas City. In the s Cadigan and a childhood girlfriend "invented a whole secret life in which we were twins from the planet Venus", she told National Public Radio. In , Cadigan announced that she had been diagnosed with cancer. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. American science fiction author. Synners by Pat Cadigan The speculation concludes with: 'Fuck it, what difference did one m I did not get very far with this one. The speculation concludes with: 'Fuck it, what difference did one more charge make, anyway? The fines would clean her out and then some, one more garnishment on her wages, so- fucking-what. All she cared about now was getting back on the street' Later, she wonders what her BFF Mark is doing: 'But the best question was what the fuck was Mark doing there all on his own without a word to her. She and Mark were in it together, always had been. They'd been in it together in the beginning, and when Galen had bought most of the video-production company out from under the Beater, and they'd been in it together when Galen had let the monster conglomerate take EyeTraxx over from him, and they were supposed to be in it together the day after tomorrow, when they were due to show up for their first full day working for the monster conglomerate. I gave up at page Not my thing. What if the tech revolution, instead of being made by start-up and college geeks, was driven by MTV-era creatives? That's essentially Cadigan's premise in this cyberpunk classic. It's impossible, obviously, not to read this novel with eyes, but I suspect that simply enriched the experience particularly as I find cyberpunk mostly irritating as a rule. It's why a lot of this review will focus on the future- vision of Cadigan. Cadigan got some things spot on - the concept not only of buil What if the tech revolution, instead of being made by start-up and college geeks, was driven by MTV-era creatives? Cadigan got some things spot on - the concept not only of built in traffic-warning GPS stands out, but even more so for the prediction that it would always get you the info just too late to do anything about it. The sense of an ever-connected life - a staple of the genre - seems much less surprising than it did in the s. But the more interesting thing is probably the fundamental differences. Mostly the assumption that what would drive technology was the entertainment industry, people's desire for spectacle that would move them, draw them in, enable them to connect with each other more deeply.