#synners

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Favorite Standalone Books

Round 1

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Victor Hugo) VS Synners (Pat Cadigan)

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Synners

Show results

Voting ended onJun 16, 2025

Propaganda for Synners :

"Weird, wild, kaleidoscopic cyberpunk epic from 1991 that manages to still feel fresh, original, and compelling. Bonus: none of weird orientalism that a lot of cyberpunk at the time was based around!"

- @specialagentartemis

[specialagentartemis]

I increasingly think that Arcane fans would like Synners by Pat Cadigan.

It’s thoroughly different in setting and plot—it’s a cyberpunk novel set in 1991’s vision of a high-tech future Los Angeles—but has, I think, a very similar style and spirit to the story of a large cast of mostly well-meaning but clashing characters hurtling a city to its breaking point. Synners is vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a city and the interconnected people who live in it, on the cusp a major technological change that's going to force everyone to change in return.

It depicts the initial invention and early days of brain-sockets that allow people to jack directly into the internet. Following a swirling cast of characters, from homeless teens to entertainment tech CEOs, from the shifting participants of hacker communities to the middle-aged drudge-workers on an advertising agency salary, to aging rock musicians and dreamy-eyed artistic druggies, all the people whose lives are going to be different forever. Who are changing for the machines.

The cast of characters is large but four core perspectives anchor the book: Sam, a teen hacker, who runs more with her street friends than with her businesswoman mom, fiery with the creativity and righteous anger of a teen activist with nowhere to put it; Gabe, her father, who wanted to be an artist and never made it, and he ended up with an ex-wife who doesn't like him and a daughter who doesn't talk to him and a salaried career in advertising that he completely phones in; Gina, newly hired by Gabe's same company, who used to be a rock musician back when that was hot and anyone cared, sharp and cynical and burned-out but willing to take this leap to do something truly creative and new again even if she thinks it'll bring them all down; and Mark, her friend, creative partner, on-again-off-again lover, and pain in her ass that she still deeply cares for despite her own resentment sometimes, a visionary and a musician floating in his own world most of the time, who embraces the brain sockets so he can upload his ideas and feelings and visions to the world in wild new unfiltered ways.

Synners is organic and messy, wild and energetic, and feels fresh even when a lot of that era of cyberpunk no longer does. It can be hard to follow at first - the first 200 or so pages are an exploratory introduction to the characters and their world. And then around the halfway mark it's like Cadigan snaps her fingers and everything springs to life and oh, shit, suddenly everything's happening and storylines start colliding and it's a breathtaking brutal poetic machine of a plot she's built.

[a7xbrazilianfans]

Synyster Gates School Store are only doing 200 of “Synners” red exclusive shirts. This limited edition collection of 200 shirts in total will be personally signed and individually numbered by Synyster Gates himself. Did you get one? Here's the link: https://buff.ly/2R30u8q

[fragments-of-a-hologram-dystopia]

Review: Synners

Author: Pat Cadigan

Genre: sci-fi, cyberpunk

Year: 1991

Notes: I have read the italian translation by Giuliana Giobbi. Read this review in Italian here.

In this world where music videos are where the cutting edge tech is employed and where people - ravers, tattoo artists, hackers, videomakers - live on the edge and fight against powerful megacorps, a new technology is invented. These sockets, placed on the back of the neck, can connect a person to the net and allow them to create videos, movies and to experience content in a way that the current virtual reality would never allow. But they come at a price… as we discover following the lives of many characters. There’s Sam, a young hacker. There’s her father, Gabe Ludovic, who spends way too much time in his virtual reality to escape a shitty marriage and a job he has no interest in doing. There’s Visual Mark, a videomaker with a brain whose image-creating sections are overdeveloped. There’s Gina, video maker and Mark’s girlfriend (relationship status: complicated). And then there’s the hacker Keely, the evil megacorp guy Manny Rivera, the musician Valjean with his super cool holographic cape, a older hacker named Fez… so yes, many many characters. Perhaps a bit too many, but I’ve seen other writers handle such an amount characters far worse that at this point it’s not even the novel’s biggest problem.

No, the novel’s biggest problem is that, just like Neuromancer, it’s a mixture of badly aged concepts, cool ideas and interesting characters. And just like Neuromancer, I have no idea what the hell I have just read. I have read Neuromancer multiple times, both in italian and english, and that helped me tremendously, and now I can say I am fairly certain I understand it. Do I understand everything about Synners? No, I don’t think so, and I can’t blame the translation, it seems fairly good.

Plenty of things happen in Synners, and yet I have the feeling nothing is really happening, especially in the beginning. It’s hard to pinpoint immediately why is it crucial that the evil megacorp is buying Visual Mark’s small company, and so on. “Action” in the traditional sense of the world also starts late in the novel.

This novel’s saving grace lies in its characters, some of which can really be seen as main characters, like Gina, Sam and Gabe - and, to a certain extent, Visual Mark. The characters’ internal conflicts and struggles are well designed and interesting. Virtual reality is a mindfuck place exactly like Neuromancer’s, but the technology we see in Synners comes with interesting concepts such as the identity of the hacker Dr. Fish, the GridLid driving system and the sockets technology itself. Virtual reality is quite similar to today’s virtual reality, and the obsession for tv channels called [something] porn feels incredibly real (like disaster porn, food porn, sickness porn etc). Sure, today no one would cause such a mess to make music videos, and this is one of the reasons why this novel hasn’t aged really well in every aspect. Definitely an interesting read if you’re into cyberpunk, but try to read at least 40-50 pages everytime (not 10-20 pages every day like I had to).

[sufferthesea]

I owe a HUGE TREMENDOUS THANK YOU to @syndellwins for donating to my Ko-Fi! I have plenty of cough syrup and chicken noodle soup now to get over my never-ending cold! Your unprompted generosity moved me to tears and even though you didn’t want me to draw you anything, I had to. The ref is from @goldentar (at least I think so). 

Sorry if you aren’t this dark ;__; I stalked your insta lol. I got off-brand versions of Copic markers and the one I used was lighter when I tested it, but maybe I pressed to hard when actually coloring ... I tried doing highlights with a Gelly Roll pen. Also I rlly love drawing blood sorry hahaha. 

You’re so lovely and kind and selfless. You seriously have no idea how much you’ve cheered me up or encouraged me. (Also it took so long to do this bc I actually did 6 other test drawings for you but this is the only one that turned out.) (ooh also it’s like a birthday gift! hehehe. Happy birthday!) 

[synnerforever08]

Coming Soon...The Grammys <3 

[specialagentartemis]

Hi, would you mind giving some good 90s cyberpunk recommendations? Cyberpunk and sci fi in general are a huge scary ocean, and I'm afraid to enter it without a guide.

Gladly!! There is SO much out there, I don't blame you.

A thing that can be intimidating is that quite a lot of 90s cyberpunk is directly reacting to 80s cyberpunk. A lot of 80s cyberpunk isn't actually all that good, though, so personally I'm of the opinion that you can skip a lot of it without losing the interesting parts of the genre. (Though I still have a deep love for William Gibson's iconic short story "Burning Chrome," which is one of the only Gibson works I'll genuinely recommend, especially if you want to get a sense of what OG cyberpunk is.)

90s cyberpunk is frequently called "post-cyberpunk" because it's when women and queer people started turning cyberpunk ideas on their head and writing their own communities and concepts into the genre, thinking about how the oppressive cyber-corporate-dystopias that the men of the 80s imagined would affect marginalized people and women. And yet for SOME reason the only 90s post-cyberpunk anyone ever recommends is straight white man Neal Stephenson. Funny, that.

But if you want to read some of my gay/feminist 90s cyberpunk favorites:

Trouble And Her Friends by Melissa Scott (1994). This is the most classically "cyberpunk" novel you will ever read. If you want cowboy coders riding the 'net in glittering crystalline cyberspace, this is your book. It's structured, in a lot of ways, like a Western, but set in the near-future cyberspace imaginings of the '90s. It's about a master hacker, India Carless, online alias Trouble, who swore off hacking - until someone showed up on the 'nets using her alias and causing, well, trouble. She reunites with the girlfriend she left, and together they track down who's the outlaw using Trouble's name. It sounds kinda silly, and in some ways, it is - and in others, it hits really close to home. Trouble didn't give up hacking because she wanted to - she gave up hacking because Congress passed a set of laws that were intended to instill internet safety, but instead just criminalized the actions of people like... Trouble and her friends. And Trouble's friends were a multiracial friend group of queer hackers. The passage of the law fractured the group, and only years later, as the novel progresses, do these people start to reconnect in a world proven hostile to them. Reading the scenes where the queer hacker friend group watch the news feeling sick to their stomachs knowing that the law was going to get passed hit far too close to home. It's intentionally similar to cyberpunk founder William Gibson, except Trouble and her friends are fighting against the straight white male hackers Gibson and his ilk so often represented.

Synners by Pat Cadigan (1991). Whoa. This book. This book. Synners is wild and baroque and energetic and organic, full of lurid imagery and emotional depth.  It follows a large cast of loosely-connected Los Angeles techno-losers - grungy teen hackers, hard corporate executives, burned-out rock musicians, dreamy-eyed druggies, failed-artist salarymen - as they navigate their relationships with each other, with technology, and with their world.  Most of the story revolves around the invention of brain sockets, the first days of the ability to interface your brain input/output directly with the internet, and what that means.  It’s slow and exploratory at first, but about halfway in all the details that Cadigan has been meticulously laying suddenly snap to life, and everyone and everything comes together in a breathtaking brutal poetic machine of a plot you didn’t even realize she's been building. This is another book where the perspectives of women, people of color, queer people, and other marginalized people (hippies, drug-users, and artists are among this group) are centered, specifically how they get used, ignored, or abandoned in the corporate drive to capitalize on new technology, and how their communities are what hold them together and save them. No solitary lone wolf hackers here.

The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed (1996, originally published under the name Raphael Carter). Proof that Tor has been ahead of the queer sci-fi curve for as long as it's been around. This one is, somewhat, the opposite of the above - it's heavily about the isolation of being queer in an oppressive techno-surveillance state. It's dense, beautiful, literary, and emotionally riveting. I love the main character, Maya, a lesbian journalist in future Russia, who is frustrated with her life of doing immersive VR puff pieces about nothing real or useful - until in her research she stumbles on suppressed information about a recent genocide that the government does not want anyone to talk about. The Fortunate Fall takes a lot of the trappings of cyberpunk - the oppressive system, the global Net that allows everyone to touch mind-to-mind, the total lack of digital privacy, the lone intrepid truth-telling hacker up against the unstoppable machine - and does things with them that makes them feel both real and transcendent, lived-in and mythical and genuinely emotionally harrowing. Also, it's about whales. It's not a happy book, and feels very much in the vein of depressing 19th century Russian literary classics, and damn, is it beautiful.

Those are my favorites, but there are others I've read (Slow River by well-established lesbian sci-fi/fantasy author Nicola Griffith is a strange, semi-literary, interestingly experimental cyberpunkish book full of dubiously consensual lesbian sex, class struggle, and lots of detailed descriptions of how the main character's tech superpower is being the best wastewater treatment plant manager ever, and also every significant character is gay; The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata had mediocre character work but absolutely fascinating use of programmable nanomachines and the way rich men vs. poor women interacted with them) and ones I haven't read yet but want to (Nearly Roadkill by Caitlin Sullivan and Kate Bornstein is generally regarded as the fist trans sci-fi book by a trans author, all about gender and sex exploration in the disembodied but highly political world of 90s-style chatroom-based internet; China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh is a coming-of-age novel about a mixed-race gay man in a highly corporatized China-dominant geopolitical world, which, like Gibson, is written by a white American expat who lived for years in China, but unlike Gibson, she wasn't as discomfited and dehumanizingly Orientalizing about it as he was when he lived in Japan).

90s queer/feminist cyberpunk was very much a movement, or maybe counter-movement, in the flow of sff's history! I'm not sure if it set the stage for the queer sff boom we're having today, but I think it was part of it.

Also, for great, accessible, extremely fun, REALLY good, queer-normative, and cyberpunk-y modern books that's a great entry point into the modern sci-fi scene, I highly HIGHLY recommend The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells (2017-present). Starting with the novella All Systems Red, it's a far-future galaxy-spanning story about a security cyborg that named itself Murderbot, who's supposed to be a big scary Murder Robot With Gun Arms but instead is a confused, anxious, nerdy, agender/aro/ace person trying to slack off work, watch tv, and figure out what it wants and what personhood and friendship means to it within the capitalist hell world it was made for.

I hope some of these strike your interest! They're great examples and great points of contact with this specific movement within sci-fi literature, one of my absolute favorites.

Happy reading!

[synnerforever08]

Honey <3