#synners

Round 1

Propaganda for Synners :

"Weird, wild, kaleidoscopic cyberpunk epic from 1991 that manages to still feel fresh, original, and compelling. Bonus: none of weird orientalism that a lot of cyberpunk at the time was based around!"

It’s thoroughly different in setting and plot—it’s a cyberpunk novel set in 1991’s vision of a high-tech future Los Angeles—but has, I think, a very similar style and spirit to the story of a large cast of mostly well-meaning but clashing characters hurtling a city to its breaking point. Synners is vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a city and the interconnected people who live in it, on the cusp a major technological change that's going to force everyone to change in return.

It depicts the initial invention and early days of brain-sockets that allow people to jack directly into the internet. Following a swirling cast of characters, from homeless teens to entertainment tech CEOs, from the shifting participants of hacker communities to the middle-aged drudge-workers on an advertising agency salary, to aging rock musicians and dreamy-eyed artistic druggies, all the people whose lives are going to be different forever. Who are changing for the machines.

The cast of characters is large but four core perspectives anchor the book: Sam, a teen hacker, who runs more with her street friends than with her businesswoman mom, fiery with the creativity and righteous anger of a teen activist with nowhere to put it; Gabe, her father, who wanted to be an artist and never made it, and he ended up with an ex-wife who doesn't like him and a daughter who doesn't talk to him and a salaried career in advertising that he completely phones in; Gina, newly hired by Gabe's same company, who used to be a rock musician back when that was hot and anyone cared, sharp and cynical and burned-out but willing to take this leap to do something truly creative and new again even if she thinks it'll bring them all down; and Mark, her friend, creative partner, on-again-off-again lover, and pain in her ass that she still deeply cares for despite her own resentment sometimes, a visionary and a musician floating in his own world most of the time, who embraces the brain sockets so he can upload his ideas and feelings and visions to the world in wild new unfiltered ways.

Author: Pat Cadigan

Genre: sci-fi, cyberpunk

Year: 1991

Notes: I have read the italian translation by Giuliana Giobbi. Read this review in Italian here.

In this world where music videos are where the cutting edge tech is employed and where people - ravers, tattoo artists, hackers, videomakers - live on the edge and fight against powerful megacorps, a new technology is invented. These sockets, placed on the back of the neck, can connect a person to the net and allow them to create videos, movies and to experience content in a way that the current virtual reality would never allow. But they come at a price… as we discover following the lives of many characters. There’s Sam, a young hacker. There’s her father, Gabe Ludovic, who spends way too much time in his virtual reality to escape a shitty marriage and a job he has no interest in doing. There’s Visual Mark, a videomaker with a brain whose image-creating sections are overdeveloped. There’s Gina, video maker and Mark’s girlfriend (relationship status: complicated). And then there’s the hacker Keely, the evil megacorp guy Manny Rivera, the musician Valjean with his super cool holographic cape, a older hacker named Fez… so yes, many many characters. Perhaps a bit too many, but I’ve seen other writers handle such an amount characters far worse that at this point it’s not even the novel’s biggest problem.

No, the novel’s biggest problem is that, just like Neuromancer, it’s a mixture of badly aged concepts, cool ideas and interesting characters. And just like Neuromancer, I have no idea what the hell I have just read. I have read Neuromancer multiple times, both in italian and english, and that helped me tremendously, and now I can say I am fairly certain I understand it. Do I understand everything about Synners? No, I don’t think so, and I can’t blame the translation, it seems fairly good.

Plenty of things happen in Synners, and yet I have the feeling nothing is really happening, especially in the beginning. It’s hard to pinpoint immediately why is it crucial that the evil megacorp is buying Visual Mark’s small company, and so on. “Action” in the traditional sense of the world also starts late in the novel.

I owe a HUGE TREMENDOUS THANK YOU to @syndellwins for donating to my Ko-Fi! I have plenty of cough syrup and chicken noodle soup now to get over my never-ending cold! Your unprompted generosity moved me to tears and even though you didn’t want me to draw you anything, I had to. The ref is from @goldentar (at least I think so). 

Sorry if you aren’t this dark ;__; I stalked your insta lol. I got off-brand versions of Copic markers and the one I used was lighter when I tested it, but maybe I pressed to hard when actually coloring ... I tried doing highlights with a Gelly Roll pen. Also I rlly love drawing blood sorry hahaha. 

Gladly!! There is SO much out there, I don't blame you.

A thing that can be intimidating is that quite a lot of 90s cyberpunk is directly reacting to 80s cyberpunk. A lot of 80s cyberpunk isn't actually all that good, though, so personally I'm of the opinion that you can skip a lot of it without losing the interesting parts of the genre. (Though I still have a deep love for William Gibson's iconic short story "Burning Chrome," which is one of the only Gibson works I'll genuinely recommend, especially if you want to get a sense of what OG cyberpunk is.)

90s cyberpunk is frequently called "post-cyberpunk" because it's when women and queer people started turning cyberpunk ideas on their head and writing their own communities and concepts into the genre, thinking about how the oppressive cyber-corporate-dystopias that the men of the 80s imagined would affect marginalized people and women. And yet for SOME reason the only 90s post-cyberpunk anyone ever recommends is straight white man Neal Stephenson. Funny, that.

But if you want to read some of my gay/feminist 90s cyberpunk favorites:

Trouble And Her Friends by Melissa Scott (1994). This is the most classically "cyberpunk" novel you will ever read. If you want cowboy coders riding the 'net in glittering crystalline cyberspace, this is your book. It's structured, in a lot of ways, like a Western, but set in the near-future cyberspace imaginings of the '90s. It's about a master hacker, India Carless, online alias Trouble, who swore off hacking - until someone showed up on the 'nets using her alias and causing, well, trouble. She reunites with the girlfriend she left, and together they track down who's the outlaw using Trouble's name. It sounds kinda silly, and in some ways, it is - and in others, it hits really close to home. Trouble didn't give up hacking because she wanted to - she gave up hacking because Congress passed a set of laws that were intended to instill internet safety, but instead just criminalized the actions of people like... Trouble and her friends. And Trouble's friends were a multiracial friend group of queer hackers. The passage of the law fractured the group, and only years later, as the novel progresses, do these people start to reconnect in a world proven hostile to them. Reading the scenes where the queer hacker friend group watch the news feeling sick to their stomachs knowing that the law was going to get passed hit far too close to home. It's intentionally similar to cyberpunk founder William Gibson, except Trouble and her friends are fighting against the straight white male hackers Gibson and his ilk so often represented.