Synners, Pat Cadigan

Synners, Pat Cadigan (1991)
Review by Ian Sales

As should be clear from the cover art to the left, Synners is in Gollancz’s SF Masterwork series, which makes Cadigan one of fourteen female authors among the seventy-eight authors in the series so far. Even more remarkable, Cadigan is one of the few female authors to succeed at writing cyberpunk, the subgenre of science fiction which did more to minimise the contribution of women to the genre than any other. As for Synners‘ credentials as a SF Masterwork… It’s certainly an accomplished novel, and there are definitely worse books already in the series. But, perhaps, by 1991 pretty much everything that needed to be said by, and in, cyberpunk had already been said. Given that, it’s not easy to determine what precisely Synners brings to the subgenre, or even genre. This is not helped by certain aspects of its world-building coming across in 2015 as somewhat quaint and dated. But that, of course, is an occupational hazard of writing science fiction, and it’s a remarkable novel indeed which won’t feel dated twenty-five years after being written.

The plot of Synners centres around a new technology, “sockets”, which allows for direct neural interfacing. But rather than in service to computer programming, this is used to experience entertainment media, especially “rock videos”. In the twenty-first century, this seems like an odd place to put the cutting-edge of computing, and from what I remember of 1991, the shine had long since rubbed off MTV. But there is also an Internet of sorts in Synners, and in describing this Cadigan proves almost prophetic in parts. However, the constant references to “datalines”, ie, landlines, feels a little dated in our current wifi world…

All of which is to say that the technology on which the story of Synners sits – and for cyberpunk fiction, this is no open landscape but a fully-populated mise en scène whose every element is important – is not the most convincing aspect of the novel. The aforementioned sockets, for example, are all but magical – no real explanation is given how their filaments might propagate through the brain to exactly the right areas for the sockets to be effective (although there are some convincing discussion of neurology). On the other hand, the computing mentioned throughout has the ring of believability – as of the state of the art in 1991, when 40 MB was considered a pretty hardcore harddisk…

But a science fiction novel is more than just the world of its story. Synners feels like it has… too many characters. It opens in a tattoo parlour in a run-down Los Angeles, and then bounces among a dozen or so characters, before the plot finally kicks into gear about a third of the way into its 475 pages. And even then, the focus is not entirely clear. There’s been a take-over of a video production company, EyeTraxx, by a media conglomerate, Diversifications, because EyeTraxx had a small medical research lab and that’s where sockets came from. In hindsight, this is not entirely plausible, but never mind. But the idea of a company which specialises in enhancing Hollywood studio films through the use of CGI is surely prophetic (rumour has it such firms these days are even used by celebrities for their private videos, such as those they take at birthday and anniversary parties).

In transpires that Diversifications’ takeover of EyeTraxx threatens the datalines. Because the brain of Visual Mark, EyeTraxx’s chief programmer, is somewhat overdeveloped in the areas where the sockets interact, so when he suffers a stroke while connected… and he has spent so much time connected he has pretty much spread out his mind through Diversifications’ many, many computers and computer systems… The stroke takes down parts of the datalines, and a second major stroke inflicts even more damage because it manages to mutate into a semi-sentient virus.

All this is told through the viewpoints of several characters, most of whom have little agency in the world of the book, although they do have agency in the narrative. They are drop-outs and hackers and the sort of people who spend most of their time at raves. But because they’re not driven by a need to increase market share or revenue, they’re the only ones who can see what the problem really is and so take it upon themselves to fix it.

Synners is far from being a bad novel. The prose is taut and well-written, and if the characters tend to blur together that’s more a consequence of there being so many than it is of Cadigan’s failure to make them distinct. The story takes a while before it picks up sufficient speed for narrative impetus to drag the reader along, but once it’s up and running it’s a fast read. It suffers a little because of its insistence that rock videos are where all the computing and artistic rebels can be found. And while much of the technology on display is plausible, if a little dated in places, some of it is a bit hand-wavey.

Synners deserves its spot in the SF Masterwork series – not because it was written by a woman, not because it is cyberpunk, and certainly not because it is a cyberpunk novel written by a woman… but because it snapshots in muscular but well-chosen prose a particular moment in science fiction’s history. And it does so in a distinctive voice. Worth reading.