In the beginning there was a coffee bar. And Cadigan said, in this coffee bar let there be an unnamed Japanese guy trying to sell an unnamed white guy a gel cap containing a creation myth distilled from millennia of racial memory. And let this gel cap mark the user's body fluids and act as a passkey, so that, when the ingestor enters artificial reality (AR) via hotsuit and head mount, he'll be able to find the mythical "outdoor"-AR's version of the Holy Grail. About half of Tea from an Empty Cup first appeared electronically in Omni Online in 1995 as a novella called "Death in the Promised Land." In the current novel, the "Death in the Promised Land" storyline (chaptered under the same name) alternates with a new storyline called "Empty Cup." The two stories are integrally related but don't interact, except briefly toward the end of the book.
"Empty Cup" focuses on Yuki, a woman searching for long time friend Tom Iguchi, who has disappeared after a stint as "boy-toy" to the aristocratic Joy Flower. Yuki approaches Joy Flower and is hired as her assistant. But when Yuki goes to her new apartment below Joy Flower's office, she's told to sleep in a hotsuit. When she slips it on, she's involuntarily injected with stimulants that cause her to enter AR in a hyped-up state. And when she sees her virtual reflection in a pane of glass, it's Tom's face that is staring back at her.
In the alternate story line, a kid has had his throat cut in an AR parlor while online and Detective Dore Konstantin has shown up to investigate. It's the eighth murder of this type in as many months. While questioning the employees of the AR parlor, and its clientele, the name Body Sativa comes up repeatedly. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine who Body Sativa is in realtime, so Dore decides to venture into AR herself to locate and question her. She enters the scenario in which the kid died-"post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty"-wearing the persona he died in.
After that things get wacky. SF has never seen a who-done-it-in-cyberspace creation myth before. People are living in burning cars, falling out of airplanes, the gods of old Japan are performing bunraku with the characters, Bhoddisattva is reborn and, frankly, everyone is looking for Tom (who may or may not be hiding in a cave).
Cadigan may lack Lucius Shepard's elegance or William Gibson's startling imagery, but she has her own hard-edged virtuosity. Anyone well-read in Science Fiction will be entertained here by her nods to Alfred Bester, James Tiptree, Jr., and Samuel Delany. Be forewarned, however: this book is nothing if not densely packed. After an initial wowie, zowie period over the deftness with which she creates worlds existing within worlds that are mirroring worlds, the reader may feel somewhat bludgeoned by such virtuosity. Sensory overload threatens to deaden the senses and instill a desire to skip pages, and Cadigan might have traded a little zowie for more depth. Still, she really does get tea to flow from an empty cup...
It's definitely worth reading for that alone.
Go to the main Nova Express Home Page
Go to Lawrence Person's Home Page
After almost drowning in a deluge of Korean Spam, I'm now munging my e-mail address, so please remove all the "H"s from the following to e-mail me: lawrencehh@hiho.com
Like every other web page in the universe, this one is Under Construction.