Tea From An Empty Cup (Hardcover)

by Pat Cadigan (Author) "Now, why would anyone become a prostitute?..." (more)
Key Phrases: Shantih Love, Body Sativa, Noo Yawk Sitty (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (August 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312866658
• ISBN-13: 978-0312866655
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,320,218 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Give us a new world please..., July 16, 2000

By	Eric Franklin "gyring and gimbling in the wabe" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tea From An Empty Cup (Mass Market Paperback)

First of all, Pat Cadigan at her worst is better than 95% of the science fiction authors out there. With that said, this debacle, "Tea from an Empty Cup," could use a little help. What is so disappointing for me is that the general themes of this book rely so heavily on well-established cyberpunk convention. Apocalyptic cityscapes, artificial realities, and this Gibsonesque "Japanese-ness" all have been explored in more unique ways before this book. While much of the book travels this old territory, SOME of the ideas are quite good. Cadigan is at her best when exploring the nature of identity and its fallibilty in regards to technological communities - it's what she did in both "Synners" and "Fools" (both of which are better, more substantive books than this one). This book is a mild success on that front, but it fails to give us a new context in which to put it - to suss out all of the ramifications of her theories. I think this text had the potential to be much more dangerous and interesting if she had made these matters more relevant and focused, possibly by building the world of the text around her actual plot instead of this "plug-and-play" environment that has been used countless times before. Using tried tropes of the cyberpunk field is not a way to get past the work of setting up an environment that the book could actually benefit from. In fact, Cadigan would do well to try and shed herself of the "goddess of cyberpunk" moniker that she's apparently trying to keep. Cadigan is an amazing talent, a great storyteller - if she ever builds us a world as variegated as her plots and the technology being utilized, and tries to keep it relevant to modern-day readers, she's going to turn cyberpunk on its head.

It's a quick read at a short 250 pages or so. If you've read and enjoyed her other work, you'll probably be satiated. Worth reading if you've got a hankering to toy with notions of identity, but not if you've only got time for the truly revalatory.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Less is less, September 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Tea From An Empty Cup (Mass Market Paperback)

Reading Tea from an Empty Cup, you get the ominous feeling that Pat Cadigan is starting to really believe her own hype, or that she has spent too much time surrounded by academic sycophants telling her she's the embodiment of feminist cyber-cool.

This is a shame, because while she has not yet written a really satisfying novel, and has never actually justified the status she has, she was at least full of ideas, and willing to play with them.

Cadigan's Empty Cup is indeed full of nothing and not in the Zen way that she implies. It is a slim novel made up of cliche, racial sterotypes, and outdated previously fashionable cyberpunk tropes. Every character and and idea seems familiar from somewhere else. It has nothing new to say, not does it shed new light on old subjects.

Particularly sad are the Japanese characters and themes - so we haven't got beyind the Japan of Zen, tatami and bunraku, have we? Just mentioning a few Japanese names and terms doesn't indicate understanding, and Cadigan's Japanese-ness seems to come from a tourist guide. Maybe that's the point, but I don't think so.

Please Pat, start again, ignore the academics, and give us something more substantial. You only get two stars because at least you can write!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tea a Deceptive Read, April 29, 2001

By	Graham J. Murphy "[e-mail]" (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tea From An Empty Cup (Mass Market Paperback)

OK, so the bulk of the reviews here don't seem to favour Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup. Don't let them dissuade you. Cadigan's novel is a fine read for a variety of reasons. First, it turns key cyberpunk images upside down (notably Japan's fall from dominance) while sticking to Cadigan's interest in subverting identity. Second, it is one of the few cyberpunk-inspired texts that actually considers the function of race vis-a-vis artificial realities (Gibson's Rastafarians in Neuromancer don't count since they don't access cyberspace). Third, it introduces characters that re-appear in her follow-up Dirvish is Digital. I've read the UK edition of Dervish (which doesn't get published in North American until July) and it seems Cadigan will be returning to the ambiguous ending of Tea in a future novel (the Yuki figure reappears twice in Dirvish). So, it'd be best to read Dirvish immediately following Tea as the material moves forward. Yes, Cadigan's writing style has changed, but whose hasn't after 15 years writing sf? All in all, an enjoyable read that has more going on underneath the surface than has previously been credited. Enjoy.