Cadigan's Synners writes the cyberpunk body as a site of pleasure and catastrophe, not heroism

SEP 01 1991 · 12:00

Video: 5 must read cyberpunk science fiction Date: 1991-01-01 · Type: literature · Tags: pat-cadigan, synners, arthur-c-clarke-award, female-lineage, body-horror, neural-interface, political-economy, literary-canon "Change for the machines." — epigraph, Synners Pat Cadigan was the only woman in the original *Mirrorshades* table of contents, contributing "Rock On" — a story about a music-industry neural interface that consumes its users — and she remained, as she has dryly noted, "the Queen of Cyberpunk" largely because the throne was never crowded. *Synners* (1991) won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992 and is among the genre's most sustained engagements with the political economy of networked technology. Where Gibson wrote outsider hackers moving through corporate infrastructure and Sterling wrote insider operators managing system transitions, Cadigan wrote artists and addicts — characters whose relation to the network is libidinal rather than transactional. The synthesizers (synners) of the title are video artists who can jack directly into the production apparatus; the catastrophe the novel builds toward is not a heist or a war but a stroke, a cascade failure in the nervous system of a human being who has become too continuous with the network. Cadigan's horror is biological and social at once: the body that plugs in becomes legible to the system, and legibility is the condition of exploitation. The contemporary SF genre's female lineage — Melissa Scott, Maureen McHugh, Annalee Newitz, Malka Older — runs visibly through Cadigan. That this lineage is less frequently cited in crypto-culture's literary genealogy than Gibson or Stephenson is itself a data point worth naming. The cypherpunk movement was male-dominated; the literary movement that informed it was not, but the inheritance was selective. Facts • Synners — Bantam Spectra UK, 1991. Winner: Arthur C. Clarke Award (1992). • Mindplayers (1987) — debut novel, nominated for Philip K. Dick Award (1988). • Fools (1992) won a second Clarke Award (1995); only writer to win the Clarke twice consecutively. • Only woman in the Mirrorshades (1986) table of contents. • Cheap Truth contributor (1983–86) under her own name. Primary Documents • Pat Cadigan — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Cadigan