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 1991 novel with 2014 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 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 1990s.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. And that this would be fueled by the drug-addled, vision-inspired world of video creation, which end up replacing even "Old Hollywood".Instead, it seems to me, while communication and connection have driven a lot of our technology in the last decade, it has been less immersive forms - text-based communication that doesn't rely on synchronicity to be effective; communication that enables us to chat lightly with a wide range of people - not the kind of tech that lets you get (literally) into your lovers head. Similarly, our entertainment industry has gone for more superficiality - cheap swelling-music emotional moments and lots of eye candy explosions - not the kind of dizzying, emotive, complex sequences Cadigan envisages. I'm not sure what that means about who we've become, but Cadigan's vision gave me a different way of looking at it.Of course, Cadigan wasn't predicting the future, she was writing a novel. And it's a great read. As mentioned above, this isn't my preferred genre, and I'm absolutely not a video music geek either, so I'm a tough audience. Like a lot of sf, the book asks a lot at the beginning, introducing a large cast with whiplash speed, alongside a new slang dialogue. The ebook would really have benefited from Amazon's x-ray feature, letting you quickly look up characters, but it wasn't set-up. I found myself searching for names to remind myself of who was who for roughly the first 30%, when it all comes together and the pace picks up in a pretty absorbing way, and I started to tear through. There were slow bits - the video sequences in particular, but mostly it was a pretty simple story well told, and I enjoyed it to the end. Can't ask more than that.
Cosa ti sembra questa –una finestra aperta o una ferita aperta?Sarebbe troppo scontato partire dalle forti analogie di questo romanzo con il più celebre Neuromante, fosse solo perché di entrambi non si capisce niente. Eppure ti piace. Molto. Forse proprio perché non ci capisci niente.In realtà Sintetizzatori umani pare molto più ricco e complesso del romanzo simbolo del cyberpunk, pur conoscendo, tuttavia, cadute di tono e uno stile comunque più grezzo di quello di Gibson. La differenza tra i due sta soprattutto nel differente mondo che viene evocato: quello di Cadigan è un mondo più variopinto, più felicemente caotico, eternamente dominato dall'incertezza; un dannato mondo di Schroedinger, come dice un personaggio, una vita in cui l'unica scelta possibile è quella di buttarsi, sempre, perché niente è certo. A cominciare dalle relazioni umane, traviate, drogate, rimescolate dall'invenzione degli innesti cerebrali.Centrale è il tema dell'informazione, o per meglio dire, della gestione dell'informazione: la trama, a voler riafferrare tutti i fili sparpagliati, ruota attorno all'implosione di una Internet retrofutura, sovraccarica di informazioni superflue. Nel diverso approccio al problema si nota un'altra importante differenza con Gibson: agli hacker fraudolenti, ladri di informazioni di Neuromante, si oppongono in questo romanzo i synners, i sintetizzatori umani, uomini e donne che diventano parte del processo di gestione dell'informazione. Complessa e affascinante è la definizione sfuggente del termine synners, difficilmente riproducibile in italiano: sinners, ossia peccatori, sono i personaggi di questo romanzo, che si macchiano di un peccato originale, primo atto di una trasfigurazione cibernetica dell'essere umano.A fare da sfondo, il vivo, informe, sotterraneo mondo della cultura hacker e underground, così com'era negli anni Novanta, tra tossici, famiglie disgregate, personalità vaganti.A leggere Cadigan quindici anni dopo l'interrogativo non sembra più "è questo il futuro che ci attende?". Forse quel futuro è già passato, forse lo stiamo vivendo, ma non lo sappiamo.
What do You think about Synners (2001)?
Took me three times through to be fairly sure I had all there was in this book, when I first read it back in the early 90s. It's dense. It's cryptic. Its narrative cuts are very, very sharp. It's got its own slang and a heap of expert-IT-argot and it bristles with wicked lines. "If you can't eat it or fuck it and it can't dance, throw it away." - "Ninety percent of life is being there, and the other ten percent is being there on time." And the key-motif, the one the whole book's about: "Change for the machines." O my, yes, that still works best of all.The characters are nearly as sharp as the lines, and the world-building is neat - info-LA plugged into every form of VR there was, from appetite-suppressant implants to insty-parties for the suburban wannabes, via somebody's gypsy cam and somebody else's wired up hot-suit. It has excellent space opera sub-stories, and wild ideas about the old SF chestnuts like, What is Human. To quote the other catch-phrase, is all that far enough up the stupidsphere for you?With 20 years and change since the first time, I worried that, like so many near-future cutting edge novels, it wouldn't work when the future catches up. But *Synners* makes it in spades. The info-scene is actually right on line, the comp. science was so well done that it hardly feels dated. The frenzy about viruses is all that seems a bit retrospective now. But the people are still cool. And the lines are still sharp. And the story still whacks along like Metallica on fast forward, and the scenarios haven't lost an inch of punch. Esp. the melt-down viral breakout and the last showdown on the virtual lake-shore - quick nod to "Stranger on the Shore" there - with its scene-jumping almost as fast and confusing for the reader as it is for Gina and Gabe. A few books aren't just a good read but become a world you don't want to leave. I'm happy Synners is still one in my small pile of those. Anyone too far up in the stupidsphere to whack to it, in Synnerspeak - and a number of reviewers seem to have been -well, that's a real shame for her or him.
—Sylvia Kelso
I read the first 25 pages before deciding not to continue reading this one. Synners was published in 1991, and it is very dated, including items such as: only landline telephones; routine to print out items from the internet (called a "dataline") See: Chapter 3: "... a tailored hardcopy of The Daily You printed out from the dataline...". The author makes up slang for the world in the novel, and while some of it I could make out what it was, other slang words were puzzling. There were no "info-dumps". I may be unique in that I like mini-info-dumps so that I can understand the story close to the beginning of the novel. And, lastly, our multiple heroes/heroines are all "skeleton skinny" and are all "addicts", which I find unsympathetic. Overall, not for me.
—Deedee
This is a fun read. It seems better structured and more thought out than the previous books of Cadigan's that I've read. This is in every way a "typical" cyberpunk book: standard setting- Los Angeles after its crumbled from the Big One, standard characters- misfit band of hackers against a snooty corporate middleman who unwittingly unleashes new technology into the world with unforeseen consequences. That in no way denigrates the appeal of this novel, formulas work for a reason. More interesting, by far, are Cadigan's musings on a host of topics as seen through the post-apocalyptic lens of technology run amok. She casts her gaze on entertainment culture as a type of pornography (a very fitting comparison) and the role of rock and roll as a voice for marginalized members of society who end up ruling society as their ideas are adapted into the mainstream. Cadigan deals here with William Gibson's popular notion of the Edge in a more explicit and relatable way than Gibson ever has, bashing you over the head with the point whereas Gibson mentions it only in passing.An interesting read, but not where I would begin if I were just getting into cyberpunk. Start with the genre's demigods: Gibson, Stephenson and Sterling.
—Chloe
