It's short and punchy--a double tale of a murder investigation in an immersive artificial reality and a woman looking for her friend and getting caught in some shady dealings involving stolen virtual artefacts, and access to a special level in said artificial reality).
To obtain an empty cup, players can buy or steal a cup of tea from the tea stall in east Varrock or buy one on the Grand Exchange. The story revolves around near mythical Japan, which has been destroyed in a vaguely described natural cataclysm several decades before the story opens.The generation that remembers "Old Japan" appears to have passed on. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Even the boring bits of this were neat because they so accurately described our world before the fact. I loved the world building (in a dystopic future where Japan has disappeared and the survivors struggle to find a sense of national identity, something that really resonated to me as a second-gen whose maternal country was lost to war for a while); and the artificial reality is amazing--I'm sceptical of SF's ability to predict the future, but Pat Cadigan was square on, on both the saturation of the AR by ads, and the gaming culture that develops around it, with its accompanied mysticism, its prizing of avatars and things found online and its search for hacks, new levels and new sensations (which reminded me of MMORPGs and Second Life). While it was a rather classic cyberpunk novel, which I usually enjoy, I felt it was obsolete in a way that could not be fixed. It's short and punchy--a double tale of a murder investigation in an immersive artificial reality and a woman looking for her friend and getting caught in some shady dealings involving stolen virtual artefacts, and access to a special level in said artificial reality). I generally have a difficult time with science fiction, unable to comprehend the concepts and never entertained by space ships and so forth. On the other side of the mirror, nothing is what it seems and so forth. "Real home is here - the other's ten million times ten million sticks away.
Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. September 15th 1999
It was cutting edge then. So if there was a plot, it mostly consisted of a couple characters going into Virtual Reality and having strange interactions.The same year all of us were geeking out of over Asian culture thanks to the Waschowskis, Pat Cadigan, "the queen of cyberpunk," was like, you know all that Orientialism that feels essential to cyberpunk? It was difficult for me to finish the book.
by Tor Books Lines like "she was beginning to understand why Ash and Tom spent so much time in AR" simply are not earned by any sort of dazzle in the description of the virtual setting.
[sold the drug and the suit to Ash in order to then sell his body/death to a wealthy thrillseeker This was my first Pat Cadigan book, and although I know its a teeneager now (first published 1998) I enjoyed it so much I felt I had to say something.This was my first Pat Cadigan book, and although I know its a teeneager now (first published 1998) I enjoyed it so much I felt I had to say something.I first read this ten years ago, and it hasn't lost its power. You know, like when designers or artists try to imagine how computers will be in the future. She therefore decides to investigate this young man's life within the artificial realities he frequented, even though the legal precedents already established mean that nothing she discovers is admissible as evidence because "Everything is a Lie" in AR.
I never felt invested in the characters; I never really cared about the stakes. Japanese companies outperformed their American counterparts in the marketplace, at times even buying up their flailing and failing rivals. When Yuki seeks Joy Flower out, she immediately is taken into Joy's inner circle, becoming her personal assistant, which leads her, like Konstantin, into a voyage of discovery towards the central mystery of the book. It was all super confusing, and most of the time you couldn't actually tell what was real or not (although that's perhaps the point) and more importantly you couldn't tell what was happening. I’ve always had a fascination with the cyberpunk subgenre though; combining high concept philosophical questions of the near future with computer technology and noir themes.
Yeah, maybe that's not so great.I had a hard time staying interested in the characters and the story line.This was okay, but I didn't enjoy it enough to read any further books in the series.
Telling the reader that AR is vivid does not make it so, quite the opposite, in fact. Pat Cadigan wrote one masterpiece, "Synners", and a couple of good books.Pat Cadigan wrote one masterpiece, "Synners", and a couple of good books.Pat Cadigan is an American-born science fiction author, who broke through as a major writer as part of the cyberpunk movement. AR is not just a way of life, it turns out, but also of death, as homicide detective Dore Konstantin discovers when she is called upon to investigate the death of a young man in an artificial reality parlour (think video arcade with a full wired body suit) and discovers he died the same way in the game as in reality. She keeps you wondering and leaves you wanting more. I picked up this book as a view into what was being thought about 20 years ago in terms of virtual worlds (here called Atrificial Reality).“You people, you lost your souls a long time ago, you sold them for a good parking space.”“You people, you lost your souls a long time ago, you sold them for a good parking space.”Meh. Tea from an Empty Cup is hot, fast, and savagely in control, a voyage to a realm where everything's possible and anything goes, by an author who knows the difference between what's real and what matters.
Tea from an Empty Cup is a 1998 cyberpunk novel by American writer Pat Cadigan..
PKD-flavored cyberpunk.