Brooders

Tea from an Empty Cup was a weird read. I made the mistake of reading Dervish is digital first, which is set after this one.

Pat Cadigan has an interesting style, as with “Dervish is Digital”, most of the book is spent with the characters immersed in the virtual world. So some things are just weird. She viewed the whole cyberspace/metaverse thing in a different light to William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. But her term of choice is Artificial Reality.

Quick Plot Summary:
Detective Konstantin is investigating mysterious deaths where online people are being killed in their private AR booths with no evidence of a murderer. No surveillance footage or witnesses see these odd murders. These online experiences range from games, to bizarre fetishes and in this case the reconstruction of memories. There are some who believe that Old Japan is being rebuilt in AR and be restored to it’s former glory, but a young man dies trying to give access to this virtual place.

Blurb from Amazon

The hazards of Artificial Reality are spilling into the real world–people vanish and solitary gamers are found slain in sealed AR booths. The young woman Yuki, child of a Japan destroyed before her birth, enters AR as the new assistant to the mysterious celebrity Joy Flower, but with her own agenda: to find Tom Iguchi, her missing beloved, who never was her lover but had been one of Joy’s Boyz. The hard-boiled homicide detective Dore Konstantin stalks the virtual streets of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty seeking a serial killer who may have murdered eight gamers from inside AR itself. But how do you find missing or hidden persons in a world where nothing is as it seems?

I didn’t really like it. I think I found it a bit confusing in place. Dervish is digital is a better read ( I rated it 8 / 10 ), although she may have just gotten into the groove with her original idea of AR. Artificial Reality in this book involves special body suits which simulate sensations such as pleasure, pain, falling, wind etc couple with a Head Mounted Display (HMD) to visually see and hear the world. Still an interesting near future look at any sort of immersive environment, it’s halfway between the Metaverse and Cyberspace.

In both of these books there is the hint of a “Ghost in the Machine”. If someone has an avatar online and they die, what happens to it?

Another thing that I don’t like is the whole concept of billable time. Yes, sure it would cost something to use this virtual world.. but the focus that everyone seems to be paying a lot of money to be in AR just gets a bit tired. Maybe in the context of 10 years ago that would have been accurate, but now virtual worlds don’t cost that much (e.g. Second Life, World of Warcraft – monthly fee + bandwidth).

This book definitely fits in the Cyberpunk category due to it’s cyberspace/AR/Metaverse thing, and the commentary on technology’s impact on society. I do think however, her ideas of people in the future thinking that AR is all that’s important is probably relevant. In a post scarcity world .. what is the meaning of life?

And if you can fly through the sky, get abducted by aliens, have sex with anything, experience a whole lot of things that are possible or too expensive in reality .. why wouldn’t you want to spend all your time there?

Rating: 6/10

My mate Bones recommended Slaughterhouse-Five to me. So far it seems a bit quirky, but readable. There was an interesting bit I found amusing in the first chapter where he is talking about Sodom and Gamorrah.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
  So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

I think that’s a fantastic commentary on religion and society.

From the back of the book:

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world’s great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgram’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

I am a quarter the way through, but I am enjoying the offbeat writing style (not sure if that’s what you’d call it).

This is just cool.

This software works the way you think it should.

And for another demo of image manipulating magic, check out the following from TED

This is the coolest tech/software demo I have seen in years.