Synners

Cadigan, Pat. Synners. New York: Bantam, 1991. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001. ("With an introduction by Neil Gaiman. An Axoplasm Book. Series Editor: Mark Frauenfelder."[1].

Cyberpunk novel. A large step beyond implants, "sockets" are developed that allow direct human/internet contact, with some bad effects. See for "meat" world vs. life within a cyberspace inhabited by a conscious AI, a human that becomes like an AI, a computer-virus "spike" deriving from a stroke (as in "hemorrhagic stroke" or "aneurysm"). The AI, "Art Fish" (from "artificial") merges with the former human, "Virtual" Mark Zamiatin, to form "Markt," who further merges two female-gendered VR game program characters. See for issues of love and "meat" complementing and perhaps opposed to cyberspace existence and possibilities for intimacy. Tag lines include "change for the machines," with puns on humans changing for the machines and being changed by our technology. A reliable character tells us on the last page of the Epilog that even "All appropriate technology hurt [sic] somebody. A whole lot of somebodies. […] Every technology has its original sin. […] Makes us original synners. And we still got to live with what we made" (435). Briefly summarized and analyzed by Carole F. Meyers in Magill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature 4: 905-6. Meyers refers readers to W. Gibson's Neuromancer and B. Sterling's Islands in the Net and asserts that, where those two works present "the idea of lasting love" with "bitter irony," Synners offers it "as both definitive of humanness and the necessary antidote to the ills of technology." She notes that Synners "uses the idea that data do not become information without a context. Similarly, Synners argues that people exist within the context of others […]" and usefully stresses the development of relationships among the persons of the novel. Meyer's stresses the humanistic aspects of Synners, seeing it presenting real life relationships as "much more human than the sterile if infinite possibilities of cyber-existence" (906). That is correct, but note the sympathetic interest in "change for the machines" in terms of development—change—of not just organic characters but also those who are cybernetic, and even VR.

See also John Johnston's "Computer Fictions: Narratives of the Machinic Phylum" (sic) and Karen Cadora's "Feminist Cyberpunk." Cadora notes insightfully that classic male Cyberpunk tended "to feminize cyberspace" — note etymology of the word "matrix"[2] — while in Synners

[...] the intelligent "virus" that inhabits and controls the matrix is called Art(ie) Fish. The persona that Art simulates to interface with humans is "a composition of subtle and charming androgyny. Art is often referred to by a masculine pronouns, but as one user explains, she "was calling it 'he' on no basis other than arbitrary" (§17: 167). Moreover, Art's gender ambiguity appears to be contagious. When computer genius Visual Mark commits his [Cadora 361] intelligence to the matrix, he realizes that gender is no longer a fixed quantity [sic ... §32: 381) [Cadora notes in Synners] the way that [fairly typical cyberpunk] male characters like Visual Mark enter cyberspace. He achieves total immersion in the matrix by having "sockets" implanted into his brain. A socket is also referred to as "the female ... the receiver" (§6:63). Instead of "jacking in," these cyberpunks plug wires deep inside their own brains. They are the penetrated, not the penetrating. Cadigan's male cyberpunks are automatically feminized by virtue of their entry into the matrix. (Cadora p. 362)

(See also Austin Booth's "Women's Cyberfiction: An Introduction," but note that "jacking in" can suggest to some [male] readers "jacking off,"[3] and a very high-tech form of solo sex. — RDE)

Continuing on the sex and gender theme, Cadora notes that within Cadigan's cyberspace, mergings

are not always modeled on heterosexuality. Sockets are, after all, "the new sexual preference" (§22: 227). Visual Mark blends his awareness into Art, the two of them becoming a new entity called "Markt" [...] (§32: 385). [...] When the Mark part of Markt sees his former girlfriend [...] with her new lover [...], he "felt a little sorry for them, since they would not be able to find each other as thoroughly as he and Art" (§32: 381). Cyberspace offers a union that transcends mere heterosexual intercourse. (Cadora p. 362)

Thomas J. Morrissey notes an "in-depth analysis" of cultural/political aspects of Synners in Laura Chernaik's Social and Virtual Space: Science Fiction, Transnationalism, and the American New Right (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2005),[4] in his "Social and Virtual Space" review, SFRA Review #275 (Jan./Feb./Mar 2006): 13; as of April 2023, not available to RDE, an SFRA member, here.[5]

Discussed briefly but with emphasis and put into the context of women's cyberpunk by Austin Booth in "Women's Cyberfiction: An Introduction," especially p. 36.

(RDE, 09/01/05; 14/16Mar19); finishing 23Ap23, 27Jul23