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Rating: 
Summary: Reality vs. Artificial Reality
Review: "If it's reality, how can it possibly be artificial?" One of Pat Cadigan's characters asks this question in her novel Tea from an Empty Cup. Cadigan uses the remainder of her novel comparing and contrasting reality and AR (artificial reality) and showing the limitations of the two worlds. Cadigan achieves this by taking the reader on two journeys: one of a homicide detective investigating the death of a young man in AR and the other of a girl looking for her friend who disappeared in AR. The novel starts with a chapter which seems disconnected from the rest of the book until the reader reaches the end and sees how the first chapter fits in. The novel continues with the interchanging of the aforementioned journeys.
I found it difficult to keep the stories of the homicide detective and the girl straight as they have quite similar experiences in some parts of the book. Also, every time I started a new chapter, I had to return to the previous chapter to refresh my memory as to what was happening. The two stories woven into one novel made the book somewhat difficult to understand and slightly confusing, but it added another dimension to the novel and kept me reading to discover how the stories were related.
Tea from an Empty Cup starts out a little slow, has action in the middle, and has an ending that leaves the reader a little confused, but overall is worth the few hours it takes to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Cyberspace for Dummies?
Review: ...Most of "Tea" chronicles the investigations of two people, The World's Most Clueless Detective (tm) and The World's Most Gullible Semi-Girlfriend (tm). They're both looking for someone - the detective is investigating a murder, and the girlfriend is looking her favorite jerk. The deeply irritating thing is that neither of them have a great deal of experience with AR (that's Alternate Reality) and we have to watch not just one, but BOTH of them fumble ineptly through a painfully dull cyberspace (a big, burned out, and frequently empty city... but I will say that[i was]was completely unprepared for[the ending], for two reasons: (1) it's a twist I never would have expected, and (2) it is so much more creative and intelligent than the rest of the book...I had to re-read a few pages, and was happy to do so. The ending alone gets the book an extra star; it's too bad the preceding 95% of the story achieve anywhere near that level of inspiration.
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Summary: Fool me once. . .
Review: Cyberspace is addictive, expensive and ultimately boring. Thanks for the newsflash.With numerous typographical errors, undifferentiated cardboard characters, a murderously tedious whodunit and the most uninteresting rendition of cyberpunk in a decade, Cadigan has achieved a new low in modern science fiction.
Would have been more appropriately titled, Words from an Empty Book (and even that sounds more interesting than this book ends up being).
Rating: 
Summary: Deserves(/Demands) a Second Read!
Review: I bought this book two years ago. Put it down. Came back to it and started re-reading from the beginning... This book is pure cyberpunk, and awesome! It twists your mind! Read it, and then read it again!
Rating:
Summary: Hey. . . I liked it.
Review: I have to start off by saying that the cyberpunk genre is not my cup of tea (pun intended); however, due to a course I am taking in college, I have read a few books from this genre. Out of the books I have read, I would have to say that Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup was by far my favorite. This story is centered on two female heroes, Yuki, a Japanese woman, and Konstantin, a homicide detective. These women are trying to uncover the answer to the mysterious death of a man found killed while locked in a virtual reality parlor. The tough part for the two women is that in the Artificial Reality everything everybody says is a lie, which makes it hard to find out the truth and solve the murder.
This book was very easy to understand even for someone just getting into cyberpunk novels. I found the book very entertaining and hard to put down. The ending was a bit confusing, but all in all the book was very good. Put this book on your cyberpunk bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: Hey. . . I liked it.
Review: I have to start off by saying that the cyberpunk genre is not my cup of tea (pun intended); however, due to a course I am taking in college, I have read a few books from this genre. Out of the books I have read, I would have to say that Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup was by far my favorite. This story is centered on two female heroes, Yuki, a Japanese woman, and Konstantin, a homicide detective. These women are trying to uncover the answer to the mysterious death of a man found killed while locked in a virtual reality parlor. The tough part for the two women is that in the Artificial Reality everything everybody says is a lie, which makes it hard to find out the truth and solve the murder.
This book was very easy to understand even for someone just getting into cyberpunk novels. I found the book very entertaining and hard to put down. The ending was a bit confusing, but all in all the book was very good. Put this book on your cyberpunk bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: Zen Meets Cyberpunk
Review: If you can wrap your mind around Zen concepts you might want to check out TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP by Pat Cadigan, a short, but good, novel that takes a slightly Zen approach to the idea of virtual reality. Virtual reality is here and it is cheap enough so that much of the population works just to live their lives in some of the virtual scenarios. One young man is found dead in a locked room where he was logged in. His throat was cut and there are no sharp objects in the room. A detective notices that a number of other similar deaths have occurred recently. Thus two quests are taken up as two women log in disguised as the young man and try to find out what he was doing and who he may have met. It is a strange world where things are more real than real. Sensations are heightened and rumors exist of a way out the other side. It is this world that the two women must navigate to find out what happened. The switching viewpoints are a little more confusing that is usual but the future world is quite interesting. I like the melding of cyberpunk, virtual reality and Japanese philosophy. It blends well and offers a good backdrop for that rare commodity, the science-fiction mystery. I picked up the book to look at it and found myself hooked right away. A very entertaining read if you don't mind having your mind bent and limbered up a bit. Check it out.
Rating:
Summary: Back and Forth...
Review: Tea from an Empty Cup is a cyberpunk novel with somewhat of a twist. A murder mystery entwines the lives of a smart homicide detective named Konstantin and a Japanese woman named Yuki. Konstantin's search for the killer of a young man takes her into an artificial world where she searches for answers. The bulk of the story takes place mainly in this artificial reality world where there are a thousand different ways to tell a lie, making it rather difficult to solve a murder. Yuki and Konstantin's paths slowly begin to connect over the course of the novel. Pat Cadigan's book is easy to read despite the fact that she changes her focus character as she changes chapters. New ideas such as "post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty" and others, make this book very entertaining. Japanese culture is a significant part of the book but includes enough detail for just about anyone to understand it. While the ending still left some questions in my mind, I felt that this is a well written and entertaining book. Enjoy it!
Rating:
Summary: Good fun book for cyberpunk fans
Review: This the first book of Pat Cadigan's I've read. I can't remember who or where I heard about it, but a good book. The novel is set in a near future cyberpunk world where artifcial reality (AR) is commonplace and people regularly fall into lives in AR that are more compelling that lives in the real world. The technology is believeable with enough details to satisfy hard sci-fi readers without delving into textbookese. Having enjoyed the proto-ARs that are online games, I was interested in seeing what Ms. Cadigan had to say about the future. Similiar to Gibson's Pattern Recognition, all the characters in the book are looking for something. The focus is on the role of artifical reality in these hunts. The vision is interesting, but in the end it is difficult to relate to reality. The book is fun and enjoyable as a quick read, but for more heady cyberpunk, turn to Bruce Sterling.
Rating:
Summary: Good fun book for cyberpunk fans
Review: This the first book of Pat Cadigan's I've read. I can't remember who or where I heard about it, but a good book. The novel is set in a near future cyberpunk world where artifcial reality (AR) is commonplace and people regularly fall into lives in AR that are more compelling that lives in the real world. The technology is believeable with enough details to satisfy hard sci-fi readers without delving into textbookese. Having enjoyed the proto-ARs that are online games, I was interested in seeing what Ms. Cadigan had to say about the future. Similiar to Gibson's Pattern Recognition, all the characters in the book are looking for something. The focus is on the role of artifical reality in these hunts. The vision is interesting, but in the end it is difficult to relate to reality. The book is fun and enjoyable as a quick read, but for more heady cyberpunk, turn to Bruce Sterling.
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