Amazon.com Review
Two-time Arthur C. Clarke Award winner for Best Novel, Pat Cadigan is the Queen of Cyberpunk for the brilliance of her ideas, the genius of her near-future extrapolations, and the beauty of her writing. No one else has explored and illuminated the mind-machine interface with the keen and relentless intelligence she demonstrates in her novels
Mindplayers,
Synners,
Fools, and the long-awaited
Tea from an Empty Cup. Her fourth novel is a perceptive, fascinating, witty SF mystery of artificial reality, whose paradoxical name perfectly defines its nature: an immaterial world of pure sensation, where, by legal mandate, everything is permitted and nothing is forbidden.
The hazards of Artificial Reality are spilling into the real world--people vanish and solitary gamers are found slain in sealed AR booths. The young woman Yuki, child of a Japan destroyed before her birth, enters AR as the new assistant to the mysterious celebrity Joy Flower, but with her own agenda: to find Tom Iguchi, her missing beloved, who never was her lover but had been one of Joy's Boyz. The hard-boiled homicide detective Dore Konstantin stalks the virtual streets of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty seeking a serial killer who may have murdered eight gamers from inside AR itself. But how do you find missing or hidden persons in a world where nothing is as it seems? The two plot lines subtly converge as fact and fantasy, murderer and victim, as well as understanding and identity invert in a virtual universe where the dangers are real and ever-present, and you can be anything or anyone but yourself. --Cynthia Ward
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Artificial reality is where it's at if you're hot to party in the 21st century. Plugged-in gamers flock to such AR sites as post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty for wild cyberspace adventures. It costs a bundle to visit but it's guaranteed safe; you can die in AR and be back partying the next day. But now gamers are turning up dead in the real world, impossibly dead in locked rooms, in ways that mimic their supposedly harmless deaths on the Net. Dore Konstantin, a homicide cop with little AR experience, realizes that to solve the murders she's going to have to enter cyberspace. There she searches for the mysterious entity known as Body Sativa and, in an act of deliberate provocation, does so wearing the AR appearance of Shantih Love, the latest murder victim. Yuki Harame is also searching for someone, her missing lover who may or may not be the dead Shantih Love. Although neither Konstantin nor Yuki know of each other's existence, both have entered a dark world of online sexual perversion, and both are in deadly danger. In her first novel in five years, two-time Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Cadigan (Synners; Foods) tells a gritty and downbeat tale of multiple murders, exchanged identities and cybernetic sadomasochism. Konstantin, the embittered cop, and Yuki, the rootless nisei, are effective protagonists, but, as is often the case in Cadigan's work, the author's pyrotechnic style and intensely detailed descriptions of cyberspace are the major attractions. This well-done example of cyberpunk noir detective fiction should especially appeal to fans of William Gibson.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
