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caramisha's review
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
It’s not my favorite. Having two main characters equally adverse and unfamiliar with artificial reality felt repetitive.
However, this is probably worth a read if you’re interested in cyberpunk and virtual reality. It raises interesting questions about reality and what people will do in a totally anonymous setting and also how do you even go about creating an artificial country.
jyan's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
jdhacker's review
challenging
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Good cyberpunk by and about women, which is a refreshing change of perspective from a very male dominated sub-genre.
Fair warning to crunchy cyberpunk fans, this deals almost exclusively with artificial reality and the nature of our perception of reality self, to the detriment if not outright exclusion of many of the genre's other tropes. I would say a good three quarters of this novel takes place within various 'layers' of artificial reality. A concept treated in an interesting, almost spiritual, sense.
Good enough of a read that I'll pick up the sequel.
Fair warning to crunchy cyberpunk fans, this deals almost exclusively with artificial reality and the nature of our perception of reality self, to the detriment if not outright exclusion of many of the genre's other tropes. I would say a good three quarters of this novel takes place within various 'layers' of artificial reality. A concept treated in an interesting, almost spiritual, sense.
Good enough of a read that I'll pick up the sequel.
smcleish's review
1.0
Originally published on my blog here in March 2003.
Tea From an Empty Cup takes advantage of the establishment of the cyberpunk subgenre to concentrate on one aspect found in many of its stories, leaving most of the standard ideas lightly sketched in. It is a novel about the way that people might interface with computers in the future, and is in fact almost entirely concerned with virtual reality multi-player games.
When police officer Valentin is called to an artificial reality (AR) arcade to investigate a murder, she doesn't expect to become involved in murky dealings connected with some of the most popular online scenarios (things like "post apocalypse New York"). She enters the particular scenario being accessed by the victim when he died, even though deaths due to being killed in AR are mainly an urban myth (and suggestion in his mind didn't cut his throat), as does Yuki, who is (independently) looking for her missing lover. Both these characters are AR novices, showing the contempt for it that non-gamers already tend to feel for those obsessed with computer games.
The purpose of these two characters is rather too clearly to allow Cadigan to describe her ideas about AR. Two novice users is overkill, and this combines with the fairly unimaginative ideas about how things might develop from today's technology to make the novel sometimes feel like a journalist's article about the MUDs, MOOs and the like. It is a severe problem with Cadigan's writing here that Tea From an Empty Cup frequently reads as though it is a poor copy of one of these articles. I have rarely read a science fiction novel whose extrapolation of future trends is so unimaginative.
Most cyberpunk novels take a selection of ideas from the genre and put them together, a technique which can provide depth to the story. But the concentration of Tea From an Empty Cup on just one means that it seems shallow compared with the religious ideas in Gibson's [b:Mona Lisa Overdrive|154091|Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl, #3)|William Gibson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320558292s/154091.jpg|1263322] or the cultural satire of Stephenson's [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320544000s/830.jpg|493634]h. The shallowness in Cadigan's writing is exposed even in the subject she concentrates on by the fact that it seems dated already in comparison with Neuromancer, a novel written the best part of two decades earlier.
William Gibson may think that Cadigan is "a major talent" (as quoted on the cover, this is what persuaded me to try the novel, along with the interest of the idea of a criminal investigation pursued jointly in AR and reality). If Gibson is right, little evidence for it comes across in this novel.
Tea From an Empty Cup takes advantage of the establishment of the cyberpunk subgenre to concentrate on one aspect found in many of its stories, leaving most of the standard ideas lightly sketched in. It is a novel about the way that people might interface with computers in the future, and is in fact almost entirely concerned with virtual reality multi-player games.
When police officer Valentin is called to an artificial reality (AR) arcade to investigate a murder, she doesn't expect to become involved in murky dealings connected with some of the most popular online scenarios (things like "post apocalypse New York"). She enters the particular scenario being accessed by the victim when he died, even though deaths due to being killed in AR are mainly an urban myth (and suggestion in his mind didn't cut his throat), as does Yuki, who is (independently) looking for her missing lover. Both these characters are AR novices, showing the contempt for it that non-gamers already tend to feel for those obsessed with computer games.
The purpose of these two characters is rather too clearly to allow Cadigan to describe her ideas about AR. Two novice users is overkill, and this combines with the fairly unimaginative ideas about how things might develop from today's technology to make the novel sometimes feel like a journalist's article about the MUDs, MOOs and the like. It is a severe problem with Cadigan's writing here that Tea From an Empty Cup frequently reads as though it is a poor copy of one of these articles. I have rarely read a science fiction novel whose extrapolation of future trends is so unimaginative.
Most cyberpunk novels take a selection of ideas from the genre and put them together, a technique which can provide depth to the story. But the concentration of Tea From an Empty Cup on just one means that it seems shallow compared with the religious ideas in Gibson's [b:Mona Lisa Overdrive|154091|Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl, #3)|William Gibson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320558292s/154091.jpg|1263322] or the cultural satire of Stephenson's [b:Snow Crash|830|Snow Crash|Neal Stephenson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320544000s/830.jpg|493634]h. The shallowness in Cadigan's writing is exposed even in the subject she concentrates on by the fact that it seems dated already in comparison with Neuromancer, a novel written the best part of two decades earlier.
William Gibson may think that Cadigan is "a major talent" (as quoted on the cover, this is what persuaded me to try the novel, along with the interest of the idea of a criminal investigation pursued jointly in AR and reality). If Gibson is right, little evidence for it comes across in this novel.
snowcrash's review
2.0
I really like cyberpunk, how networks change the interactions of humans who contend with two worlds, not just one. I picked up this book as a view into what was being thought about 20 years ago in terms of virtual worlds (here called Atrificial Reality).
The premise of this short book was interesting. Someone killed inside the game at the same time they are killed outside the game. (A locked room mystery) How to find the killer within a world where everything is supposed to go?
But everything is fuzzy. The real world is just hinted at. Some bits are prescient, like people being drones at office jobs and act more like gypsies. Or that the online world is so addictive the players will do anything to return. We see both today. But the world the characters inhabit doesn’t seem real. The author only describes just enough to anchor where they live, but not how or why. Usually the descriptions have to do with other places far away.
The online world is more detailed, but still limited. It is a good attempt at describing an online world, centered around a game where anything goes. But how the online world is conveyed to the reader is stilted. Both of the main characters are interchangeable, in that they both are neophyte online users. Both despise it, so their shock to the experience and fumbling around are nearly the same. Both are looking for the same person. But I didn’t care about that. I ended up finishing it to learn if there was really an Old Japan and if the murder was every solved. The ending was rushed, as if a page limit was run up against.
I’m not discounting the age of the book, as I wanted to see how such books hold up 20 years hence. In the late 1990’s it wasn’t common to think you’d have super high bandwidth access to the internet at home. So the use of a video parlor. The archiver is similar to a tablet, though it needs to be connected to the phone to move information into the network. The pervasiveness of the network isn’t seen within the fabric of society, just the online game. But it is the fuzzy characters and world that made the book one that I wanted to skim through to learn the two items from above.
The premise of this short book was interesting. Someone killed inside the game at the same time they are killed outside the game. (A locked room mystery) How to find the killer within a world where everything is supposed to go?
But everything is fuzzy. The real world is just hinted at. Some bits are prescient, like people being drones at office jobs and act more like gypsies. Or that the online world is so addictive the players will do anything to return. We see both today. But the world the characters inhabit doesn’t seem real. The author only describes just enough to anchor where they live, but not how or why. Usually the descriptions have to do with other places far away.
The online world is more detailed, but still limited. It is a good attempt at describing an online world, centered around a game where anything goes. But how the online world is conveyed to the reader is stilted. Both of the main characters are interchangeable, in that they both are neophyte online users. Both despise it, so their shock to the experience and fumbling around are nearly the same. Both are looking for the same person. But I didn’t care about that. I ended up finishing it to learn if there was really an Old Japan and if the murder was every solved. The ending was rushed, as if a page limit was run up against.
I’m not discounting the age of the book, as I wanted to see how such books hold up 20 years hence. In the late 1990’s it wasn’t common to think you’d have super high bandwidth access to the internet at home. So the use of a video parlor. The archiver is similar to a tablet, though it needs to be connected to the phone to move information into the network. The pervasiveness of the network isn’t seen within the fabric of society, just the online game. But it is the fuzzy characters and world that made the book one that I wanted to skim through to learn the two items from above.
gengelcox's review
4.0
The speculative fiction of the 1980s and the early 1990s by and large treated Japan as an economic powerhouse that threatened to subsume the United States and Europe — mirroring, unsurprisingly, the view that prevailed in the culture at large. Japanese companies outperformed their American counterparts in the marketplace, at times even buying up their flailing and failing rivals. Cultural icons such as Rockefeller Center became Japanese property. The Japanese economy was booming, while Europe and the United States struggled in the aftermath of funding the defense systems of the Cold War. From William Gibson's Neuromancer to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the clear assumption was that the future belonged to Japan.
In the latter part of the 1990s, things have changed: the United States is riding an unprecedented wave of prosperity while Japan is caught in a financial crisis that covers the whole Pacific Rim. Speculative fiction has responded (as it should) to these altered circumstances, nowhere more clearly than in Pat Cadigan's new novel, Tea from an Empty Cup, an expansion and grafting-together of two earlier stories about the future of Japan which were originally published on Omni Online. Instead of the Rising Sun, Cadigan shows us a Japan where the sun has set on its glory days.
The plot of Tea from an Empty Cup centers on the murder of an anonymous Artificial Reality (AR) junky and its investigation by policewoman Dore Konstantin. The victim, whose throat has been cut from ear to ear, was accessing the AR at the time of his death — and was being murdered there as well. Everyone knows, of course, that what occurs in AR cannot affect the real world, but Konstantin is starting to wonder: Rumors of similar AR deaths have been circulating that indicate something unusual is going on. Intermixed with Konstantin's investigation (which occurs in numbered chapters under the title of "Death in the Promised Land") is a second storyline, a search for the missing Tomoyuki Iguchi by his friend (and would-be lover) Yuki, told in chapters under the heading of "Empty Cup." Yuki fears that Tom has become one of the many lost Joyz Boyz, young men who exchange their bodies for high-speed AR access.
The hunt for friend and murderer by Yuki and Konstantin spiral around each other as they each pursue their searches into post-apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, an AR that promises fun for all, as long as you have the resources to pay for it. Survival in AR requires a mental dexterity that can easily drive someone insane, and neither woman is particularly adept at navigating the make-believe world. Both must learn how to survive in this new setting before they can make progress on their quests. It is in the heady rush to the end, as the stories spiral around each other faster and faster, like water down the drain, that the novel is at its weakest: Cadigan's prose becomes more and more concise and we lose some of the depth of the setting and characters that has been established earlier.
Tea from an Empty Cup is less densely layered than Cadigan's previous novels Fools and Synners, but it is filled with the same streetwise characters who know that, when it comes to technology, "the street finds its own uses." Cadigan's characters are the ultimate cynics and pessimists, who are nevertheless still surprised when their dim worldview is validated. In this way, Cadigan's cyberpunk (for this is the subgenre of which she is queen) is different from that of her male counterparts, most of whose visions of the future are equally bleak but whose characters lack this quality of surprisability. Yuki and Konstantin are hardened to their world, but they are still human enough to hope for better. While the flash of Tea from an Empty Cup comes from the same elements as other cyberpunk novels, what makes the story resonate with the reader long after the last page is this vestigial morality in its characters, who are trying to maintain some dignity in a world that is being made before them.
In the latter part of the 1990s, things have changed: the United States is riding an unprecedented wave of prosperity while Japan is caught in a financial crisis that covers the whole Pacific Rim. Speculative fiction has responded (as it should) to these altered circumstances, nowhere more clearly than in Pat Cadigan's new novel, Tea from an Empty Cup, an expansion and grafting-together of two earlier stories about the future of Japan which were originally published on Omni Online. Instead of the Rising Sun, Cadigan shows us a Japan where the sun has set on its glory days.
The plot of Tea from an Empty Cup centers on the murder of an anonymous Artificial Reality (AR) junky and its investigation by policewoman Dore Konstantin. The victim, whose throat has been cut from ear to ear, was accessing the AR at the time of his death — and was being murdered there as well. Everyone knows, of course, that what occurs in AR cannot affect the real world, but Konstantin is starting to wonder: Rumors of similar AR deaths have been circulating that indicate something unusual is going on. Intermixed with Konstantin's investigation (which occurs in numbered chapters under the title of "Death in the Promised Land") is a second storyline, a search for the missing Tomoyuki Iguchi by his friend (and would-be lover) Yuki, told in chapters under the heading of "Empty Cup." Yuki fears that Tom has become one of the many lost Joyz Boyz, young men who exchange their bodies for high-speed AR access.
The hunt for friend and murderer by Yuki and Konstantin spiral around each other as they each pursue their searches into post-apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, an AR that promises fun for all, as long as you have the resources to pay for it. Survival in AR requires a mental dexterity that can easily drive someone insane, and neither woman is particularly adept at navigating the make-believe world. Both must learn how to survive in this new setting before they can make progress on their quests. It is in the heady rush to the end, as the stories spiral around each other faster and faster, like water down the drain, that the novel is at its weakest: Cadigan's prose becomes more and more concise and we lose some of the depth of the setting and characters that has been established earlier.
Tea from an Empty Cup is less densely layered than Cadigan's previous novels Fools and Synners, but it is filled with the same streetwise characters who know that, when it comes to technology, "the street finds its own uses." Cadigan's characters are the ultimate cynics and pessimists, who are nevertheless still surprised when their dim worldview is validated. In this way, Cadigan's cyberpunk (for this is the subgenre of which she is queen) is different from that of her male counterparts, most of whose visions of the future are equally bleak but whose characters lack this quality of surprisability. Yuki and Konstantin are hardened to their world, but they are still human enough to hope for better. While the flash of Tea from an Empty Cup comes from the same elements as other cyberpunk novels, what makes the story resonate with the reader long after the last page is this vestigial morality in its characters, who are trying to maintain some dignity in a world that is being made before them.
myxomycetes's review
4.0
Even the boring bits of this were neat because they so accurately described our world before the fact. While I did struggle with some questions (like who's programming all these AR worlds), the bits of insight and prescient moments made it an enjoyable read.
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