Mindplayers

Rating:
Summary: Good, but lacking
Review: Pat Cadigan definately has some great ideas for cyberpunk - mindplayers, custom personalities, all sorts of neat stuff - but she doesn't make a cohesive novel out of them. Each chapter or part of the book is its own little story; there's never any real tension or suspense, or plot. There was no real climax to the story, just a rather weak and contrived personal realization by the protagonist.
This would be okay if there was more depth to the setting. Beyond some nifty ideas, there is almost no detail. I don't really know what the characters look like, or what their surroundings are. It was like being blind. More detail and depth all around would have helped immensely. During the mindplaying sequences (which are very frequent) I could barely understand what was going on. It relies heavily on mental symbolism which isn't adequately explained. Her character's voice in the 1st person narrative is a good one, she just needs some more imagery to gloss over the weak plotting.
Greg Bear's Queen of Angels is a better book covering similar ideas.
If I could I'd give another half a star for all the gizmos, but the flaws count for a lot. Still, recommended as light reading!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent reading!
Review: Pat Cadigan's MindPlayers was one of the first "sci-fi" books I read, and I fell in love with it. All the characters have their own unique quirks and personality traits, but my favorite two characters were the twins, Dolby and Dolan. Each time I read Mindplayers, I find something that I missed the last time I read the book. The creative aspects of the characters is the best part of the story. It is noteworthy that almost every character within the book has an altered appearance; no one seems to be as they were at birth. Onionheads are especially interesting, although they get only a mention. Pat Cadigan has had to endure television and movie ripoffs of some of the details within Mindplayers, but this book remains a classic and the first of its kind.

Rating:
Summary: Cutting edge cyberpunk, 20 years ahead of its time.
Review: This is Pat Cadigan's first novel, featuring Deadpan Allie (love that pun! - rock on, Cadigan). Cadigan had developed the character in stories written in the eighties. The book was published in 1987.

Seen the film The Cell, where Jennifer Lopez is inside the head of a psycho? Well, Cadigan got there over 20 years ago with Deadpan Allie, who goes into the heads of various people with some pretty crazy things going on in there, and tries to heal them.

Cadigan does a great job of knitting together the stories she wrote earlier in the eighties about Allie, and giving the whole novel a structure and an overall story arc. Allie is another of those street-smart, tough and funny women characters that Cadigan does better than anyone else. If you ran into her 'tec, Dore Konstantin in Tea from an Emtpy Cup, you'll know what I'm talking about.

This book has been out of print for quite a while, and this new trade paperback edition from Gollancz is a nice looking piece of work. It's great to see the book back in the bookstores, and I for one will be going out to replace my battered and well-read Bantam paperback copy with one of these nice yellow-jacket jobs.

Pat Cadigan is right up there with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling among the founders of cyberpunk. Is cyberpunk dead? No way! Read Mindplayers and find out how alive and kicking it is.