Cadigan - Synners

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Contents

He was looking at himself in the mirror in Medicals bathroom, turning his head from side to side. Just as theyd said, he didnt look any different. Same old head, only now it had eight holes in it, eight holes to be filled with eight plugs and a small menu of commands he could use to manipulate the images in his head.

The person plugged into the computer, physically connected, tied and yet, paradoxically, set free to range through a whole new universe within, is one of the most potent and lasting ideas to come out of the branch of science fiction labelled cyberpunk.

Although now, with our addiction to constant mobile communication, the connection would surely be wireless, beamed from any point to a chip in the brain, still the image of the computer jockey tethered to the machine has a visceral power, more so than any more realistic invisible chains. The eight snaky wires described in Pat Cadigans novel also evoke the neural pathways inside the head, suggesting their potential for being remodelled and remade by input from outside from others.

Because connection with other minds is surely the point plugging into a machine not just to play games or wallow in porn, not just to leave the meat behind while indulging escapist fantasies, but to communicate with others on a more intense and meaningful level to share your deepest self with a loved one without the usual limitations and misunderstandings imposed by language. This is the old dream of empathic powers given a freshly convincing technological spin.

Once again words failed him. Like some kind of bad joke. He had goddamn sockets in his head to send out any thought at the drop of an inhibition, and he couldnt manage to tell the person hed just spent the night with what he was doing there.

Synners had its origin in a short story titled Rock On, published in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Bruce Sterlings 1986 round-up of those writers he considered to comprise a new movement in science fiction through their allegiance to eighties culture. The only woman invited to join what otherwise seemed a boys club, Pat Cadigan was soon established as Queen of the Cyberpunks (why is it that genres are blessed with Queens, but rarely Kings, unless his name is Stephen?).

Cadigan didnt let her crowning go to her head. She continued to pursue her own vision, writing new technologies, but also about troubled, complicated people struggling with their lives; they are outsiders, and some of them are cool, and may even wear mirrorshades, but they live in a recognisably real world; theres not a glamorous, body-modified prostitute-assassin among them. Synners is undoubtedly cyberpunk Id say it is, alongside the iconic masterpiece that is William Gibsons Neuromancer, one of the defining works of that genre but it is something more than a reflection of eighties culture; it speaks very much to our current situation.

Reading it now, more than twenty years after it was written, what strikes me most strongly about Synners is how it buzzes and pulses and brims with a sense of the future and how very relevant and valid that future still feels in 2012.

Its been said often enough that science fiction novels arent about the future, but about the time in which theyre written. Of course, it could hardly be otherwise; even the most determinedly predictive and future-focused novel will reflect the contemporary hopes and fears of its author. The digital age was only just taking off when Cadigan was writing about it; two decades on, it is possible to see how prescient she was, and somewhat startling to realise that we are still only beginning to grapple with the problems she had guessed at. We agonise about spending too much time in imaginary worlds, and fear were losing touch with what matters in real life, even as that life is changing out of recognition; we worry (identifying with our computers) about being infected, being hacked, being cut off; and while artists and visionaries find ways of creating new wonders, others are exploiting them, with consequences that can never be predicted until it is too late.

Doing an online search for earlier fictional explorations of the mind-computer interface, I quickly realised this was no longer merely science fiction, but had become part of modern life. I read news stories about experiments demonstrating how people can be wired up to fly a helicopter by simply imagining they are moving a hand, a foot, or tongue. I read another report on research which had discovered the neural mechanism underlying the visual imagination, and learned that last year scientists used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to decode and reconstruct peoples visual experience of watching a short film. These and other experiments have already laid the groundwork by which the visions, dreams, daydreams or memories in one persons brain can be read and recreated. Someone, somewhere, is working on developing the technology to make it possible to capture and transmit them from one brain to another. This technology may be available in twenty years or ten or...

Read Synners now, before it happens.

Lisa Tuttle

Which is to say, synthesisers, every sense of the word, and synthetics and artificial things, all manner of artificial things.

And the view changes from where youre standing.

If youd told me twenty-five years ago that the SF that would have got it most right, up to that point, was not Heinlein or Asimov or Clarke but J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, I would not have laughed at you, just looked puzzled, just as I would if you had told me that the root form of millennial reality and millennial SF would be John Brunners The Shockwave Rider, which gave us viruses in the world computer before there were viruses, before there was a world wide web.

One of the functions, probably the most important function, of SF as literature is to describe the present to us under cover of describing the future, to explain our