With her new novel, Tea from an Empty Cup, Pat Cadigan reaffirms her position as the "Queen of Cyberpunk." Combining computers, artificial reality, and a post-Apocalyptic dystopia, Cadigan weaves a story of murder, intrigue, and false identities.The story follows two women: a young, Japanese girl named Yuki, and a homicide detective named Konstantin. While neither story seems connected at first (and both seem completely unrelated to the opening prologue), Cadigan manages to use both points of view to give the reader a larger sense of the whole.In Yuki's story (entitled "Empty Cup"), she follows her missing friend's trail to an exotic mystery woman named Joy Flower. Joy hires her as an assistant, but when Yuki checks in to her new living quarters, she finds an artificial reality hotsuit and headmount waiting for her. Scared, but curious, she plugs into AR and discovers that she is wearing the guise of her missing friend, Tom Iguchi.Meanwhile, in another story ("Death In The Promised Land"), a homicide detective is investigating the apparent murder of man who was plugged into artificial reality when his throat was slit. The staff at the AR parlor is less than willing to help, but Konstantin dons a hotsuit and headmount and heads into the strange AR world of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty to hunt down the murderer of Tom Iguchi.Cadigan does an amazing job of weaving the two plotlines together, titling and numbering each chapter after its respective story. While she bounces back and forth between Yuki and Konstantin, she allows the reader to quickly see that these stories are related, growing closer together by the end of the novel. Threading through the story is an underlying foundation of Japanese culture and mythology, which becomes integral to the story behind the story.The world Cadigan creates is filled with a wonderful understanding of the Internet and the online community. In her AR world, players are warned that everything they hear must be considered a lie, as people adopt different names and different faces to suit their needs. At one point, Konstantin helps a child find her way home, only to find herself entrapped by the child who attempts to blackmail her. Is the child really a child, or an adult wolf using a sheep's disguise?More fascinating is the subtle descriptions that show the real world from which people flee into artificial reality. Japan has been destroyed by earthquakes and covered by the sea. Real-life television shows like "Police Blotter" upstage and interfere in police work. And there is a chilling refrain reminding us about horrible places like D.C. where "life is so cheap there, it's a whole different world."In addition to great storytelling, Cadigan also provides the reader with strong female characters in Yuki and Konstantin. While the women have issues with the men in their lives (with Yuki it's Tom, with Konstantin it's her ex-husband), they both are consciously aware of their bad relationships and desire to move on. Yet, Yuki finds herself driven to find Tom despite his lousy treatment of her, while the detective constantly hears her ex's voice needling her shortcomings.Tea from an Empty Cup is a wonderful return by Cadigan, who has not published a novel in years. Despite the fact that much of the story is rooted to Japanese culture, it does not make the overall story inaccessible. In fact, it allows the reader to slowly discover its importance as the story progresses.One warning though, this story, like much of cyberpunk fiction, can be difficult to follow because of its technical aspect and vocabulary. Those who work or play with computers will be more likely to grasp the imagery of the novel more readily than someone who is not plugged in to the online community.I think Cadigan's writing echoes the artificial world in which her characters exist. It is only as difficult as the reader demands, because those involved aren't looking for easy answers. For those willing to take the time to learn the landscape (and the lingo), cyberpunk fiction can be enticing and very rewarding.
When I read Trouble and Her Friends, I was forcibly reminded of what Helen Merrick says about it in The Secret Feminist Cabal (while thinking for a moment that it was my own brilliant insight), something along the lines that women made cyberpunk very much about bodies (sorry, Helen, for badly paraphrasing). Cadigan does a similar thing here. The focus is almost entirely on the issue of bodies: who inhabits them and how much physical reality is in artificial reality and to what extent bodies - artificial and physical - are our identities... and all sorts of fun things. The story revolves around two very different women who go into Artificial Reality looking for answers: one to find someone gone missing, the other to find clues (she hopes) about a murder. Neither is experienced in AR, but other than that they are quite different. We learn very little about Yuki - not her job, not her overall circumstances in the world, just that she is "full Japanese" and that she values Tom Iguchi highly enough to seek out the probably dangerous person who might be able to point her towards him. Konstantin, on the other hand, is a slightly more open book. She has recently broken up with her partner; she's a cop; and she possesses a remarkable bloody-minded determination that will either see her crack cases or get her skull cracked for her. Having the two main characters as women is (was), it occurs to me, probably not that common in cyberpunk literature - and having the two be so different, with quite different aims, worked nicely. Of course, in AR one's physical gender, and body, and identity, are quite irrelevant - something that the protagonists have a bit of trouble with but that others are at pains to point out. Out there is not in here and can have little or no bearing depending on each individual's preferences. And, much like Doctor Who and House are both at pains to point out, people lie. In AR, it's quite likely that everyone is lying all the time. And when you're trying to find a person or trying to find clues, that's not particularly useful.The AR that both Konstantin and Yuki interact with is a... simulation, I guess, of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty (yes really).* Interacting with it and other AR users requires a complex understanding of mores and manners, and it's very easy to be shown up as a virgin and either mocked or turned into prey. It's not a very nice place, as experienced by Yuki and Konstantin, and certainly suggests that Cadigan imagines AR being used for the sort of entertainments and identity-experimentation that would be frowned on, considered morally dubious, or actually legislated against in reality. It's hinted that AR has other uses in this world, but they're not fleshed out in the slightest. It is therefore quite an unpleasant little world Cadigan introduces the reader to, and suggests that she is pessimistic about the uses humanity would put AR to. Given the amount of porn on the internet, perhaps she has a point. Finally, any novel that manages to get away with having an avatar called Body Sativa is pretty awesome as far as I'm concerned. * Interestingly, the novel is so utterly concentrated about the experiences within AR that although maybe a quarter of the novel takes place in real-reality, I have no idea in which city (I'm presuming America thanks to references to DC); I also have little idea what is going on in the rest of the world, with the exception of something terribly having overcome Japan. I have a much clearer understanding of how life, or society, works in the Sitty than in Konstantin's actual city. (And frequent ARers would undoubtedly dispute most of the adjectives in that society.)
What do You think about Tea From An Empty Cup (1999)?
Having loved Cadigan's earlier booked, I was very excited to pick up Tea from an Empty Cup when it was first out. Unfortunately I couldn't get in to it. It's a murder mystery, but I felt no empathy with why I should care about the character who had died, so didn't feel any of the drama it tried to build up. The virtual reality system the characters used was quite interesting, but the focus on 'billable time' and costs racking up while a nice parallel to the dial-up internet that had been around, when I read this all-you-can-eat packages were common and broadband was coming to homes so it already felt outdated.Dervish is Digital, based on the same universe, is a much better read. If you haven't read either, go straight to that and give this one a miss. The only reason I still own Tea from an Empty Cup is the hope that one day I'll revisit it and find it's better than I thought, and because it's a signed copy, and I like that because otherwise she's an author who's books I've greatly enjoyed.
—Paul Silver
Lieutenant Konstantin investigates the real life murders of Artificial Reality junkies, and is drawn into worlds within online worlds where questions of identity (personal and cultural) are as difficult and dangerous to navigate as questions of personal security and safety.It's a gritty, disturbing world that Cadigan paints, where deep questions of what makes people human, what makes cultures what they are, and what makes us sure of either of those things are played out in a fairly compelling (if somewhat opaque) murder investigation narrative.It's a bit of a rush and stuffed to the gills with ideas about technology, what people do with it, and what it does with us. Ultimately, though, there is more surface than depth to the novel as it rushes somewhat perfunctorily to its conclusion.
—Ben Thurley
This was my first Pat Cadigan book, and although I know its a teeneager now (first published 1998) I enjoyed it so much I felt I had to say something.It felt 'old school', and in the best way possible. Even the physical book, which is quite slim, made me nostalgic for the days when books didn't all come in trilogies and you could hold them in one hand without flirting with tennis elbow.Conceptually, the book was right up there with the best of Gibson's cyberpunk, but - perhaps in keeping with the Japanese theme - some of the more philosophical discussion in the book reminded me of Masamune Shirow's 'Ghost in the Shell' With the basic outline of the story involving two individual but linked investigations inside a virtual environment, there was an option for the virtuality to be either ridigly policed or anarchic, and I'm glad to say Pat chose the anarchy, and the 'Alice Down the Rabbit Hole' mutable logic and reason of the place comes over really vividly.Nice to see more of Pat's eariler works seem to be about to re-release, and I will be looking out for 'Synners' eagerly
—R.B. Harkess
