Pat Cadigan
Synners

"All Cadigan's work is typified by a hard-bitten but evocative prose, an understanding of the bleaker side of the human psyche, and an undergirding compassion." — Michael Bishop

"Synners is a knock-out. Witty, rude, and rich with ideas." — Ellen Datlow

As the only two-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Pat Cadigan is the undisputed queen of cyberpunk. Recently, however, the BBC took a broader view, proclaiming Cadigan "the queen of modern science fiction." Her novels and short story collections have sold over a million copies worldwide, winning both the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award, and her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Originally published in 1991, Synners is one of those rare novels that seems to have grown wiser with the years: more timely, more poignant, more startling. As Neil Gaiman notes in his new introduction, this was a novel written before virtual reality was anything more than an idea, before there was a personal computer in every home, before the potential of the internet was even understood, let alone exploited for crime. Focusing on an elite subculture of hackers and techno-wizards, Cadigan exposes the dangerous combination of forces — power, greed, human nature — that makes our ever-increasing dependance on technology so perilous and unnatural. The world she describes is at once familiar and utterly strange. It is populated with addicts of all kinds. Their drug of choice is a synthetic experience so actual as to be indistinguishable from reality. These synthetic experiences are then transformed into a package that can be sold to unwary or addicted consumers.

Written with a narrative energy and a cinematic immediacy worthy of Philip K. Dick, Synners is a fast, intelligent, and exhilarating indictment of a future we're building for ourselves.

Try to imagine Pat Cadigan writing greeting cards for Hallmark. Well, she did, for ten years. Since quitting that to become a full-time writer in 1987, she's written five novels, including Dervish Is Digital and Tea From an Empty Cup, and three collections of stories. Born in Schenectady, New York, she lives in London.