SYNNERS: After I completed the Re-read Angela Carter Project, I turned to another book I hadn’t picked up in ages–Pat Cadigan’s Synners. A while back, when I was first starting to blog, I’d re-read her Mindplayers, which is terrific (my review is here if you scroll down). I had a vague recollection that I’d tried to revisit Synners but had given up pretty quickly. So I thought maybe I should dip my beak in again.

No. Sadly, Synners has pretty much all of the tics and lapses I dislike most in science fiction. There’s an overwhelming desire to be “cool”–I think I liked her in high school, but the constantly-cussing, dreadlocked, one-note (angry/undisciplined/mother figure for this guy Mark–you’d think that would be three notes, but it isn’t) character of Gina really bored me this time around. The focus is on the Technology of the Future rather than on the characters, whose loves and needs and misunderstandings are squeezed into the interstices of the plot, and therefore have no choice but to become caricatured.

There’s also that bizarre romanticism about the Internet that crops up in so many early-’90s SF books (Synners is from 1991)–everybody had to write a book about “something alive in the Net.” The Net itself is a character! Ooh! I wonder if this trope (eh, maybe it’s not cool enough to be a trope) is the result of the belief that any complex order must be the result of specific design, rather than spontaneous interactions among complex entities according to general rules? Cue Hayek, Postrel. The idea that the thing “alive in the Net” was just us, millions of random people blogging about their cats or publishing the list of corporate donors to the Pelosi campaign or firing passionate love-emails, wasn’t good enough, wasn’t sexy enough for those who fell prey to the specific-design fallacy. (Maybe it’s also a result of misappropriating the theory, which I don’t pretend to understand, that mind is an emergent property of matter? Thus if you get a lot of really complex and mind-seeming matter together, eventually you get mind? But that sounds to me a lot like the idea that if you get a lot of meat together, eventually you get maggots.)

I also learned from Synners that: corporations are evil but government is irrelevant; in the future, slang will rhyme (PLEASE SAVE ME FROM THIS FUTURE–I mean, can anyone write “scam-jam” or “Jack Hack” without wanting to cry?); and the teens of the future will still be insufferable.

There were some aspects of Synners I liked. Cadigan gestures toward the way in which gradual changes sneak up on us, and when we finally notice what’s been going on, the point of no return is several miles back. Novelists sometimes write as if the world moves in punctuated equilibrium–calm broken by catastrophe–which I guess it sometimes does, but more often than not the catastrophe builds slowly over years and years, sinking into the fabric of everyday life like a dye, and it’s not until the thing is really indelibly set that you realize it’s poison. Cadigan has some showy catastrophes, for sure, but the book also shows this slower kind of corruption. Appropriate for the “age of sacred terror,” of which the 9/11 attacks were not the beginning. (Can’t endorse the book I linked to there, but the title works.)

I think my favorite character is the aging salaryman who gave up his artistic dreams and submerges himself in video fantasies to get through the working day. However, he’s always getting punched and hit in the head and so forth, which seems like a pretty crude way of suggesting that he offers self-sacrificing love.