Fools

In her first three novel-length forays into the world of cyberpunk, Pat Cadigan emerged with three distinct visions. In her first novel, Mindplayers, she wrote a brilliant and deeply moving exposition of direct mind-to-mind contact in psychotherapy. In her second novel, Synners, she produced an intricately plotted and fast-paced tale of corporate greed and governmental intrigue, underground resistance, and a threat to humanity's existence. Now, in her third novel (actually a set of three closely-linked novellas), she has turned out a disturbing glimpse into a near-future struggle for human individuality. In Fools, Ms. Cadigan plunges the reader in medias res into the mind of a young woman convinced of her being an actress who has franchised her personality to customers discontented with their own existence. Disconcertingly, she learns that the actress's acquaintances deny knowing her. To make matters worse, she recalls having killed someone or personal gain and somehow being connected with the hated Brain Police. In the action flowing from the foregoing premise, our heroine, Marceline et al., risks her psychological integrity as she travels through her society's savage, schizoid underworld to bring justice to the victims of criminal mind-to-mind interlinks. Marceline et al. encounters/becomes/ceases to be an Escort who helps her clients kill no longer wanted personas, a memory junkie who gets high on parts of other personalities, and a mindsuck whose memories are illegally siphoned out of her for sale on the black market. On her mission she meets other pathological products of sociotechnological change, including a woman who turns the use of food into an unspeakable perversion. Throughout her odyssey Marceline et al. strives to answer a key question: "What are you but what you recall being?" In conveying the immediacy of her heroine's experience, Ms. Cadigan has written one of the most complicated and challenging stories in sf's annals. Although she marks changes in viewpoint with changes of font, the reader will nonetheless need to pay close heed to every detail of the plot to follow its turns. (At one point the current viewpoint persona brings the complexity onstage as she thinks, "He was confused. I didn't blame him; I was starting to confuse myself.") It is hard to imagine, though, how Ms. Cadigan could have simplified her story and still made it the frightening parable that it is. Her future is peopled, not wiht rational human beings who choose technologies for considered ends, but with empty or addictive personalities helplessly transformed by runaway technology into despoilers of the world at large. Seeing the harm that such personalities can cause with presentday technology, who would deny that they might do worse with more powerful technologies to come? In a way, the last sentence of Fools is as chilling as the last four words of 1984.

The ending is what makes this book so satisfying. Fools is a novel about personality, how much is your own and how much is grafted on to you without your knowledge. Like Pat's other work, Fools is gritty and witty, pumped up on technology (high) and grifters (low). What she doesn't explore here--things like the actual workings of a mindplaying theatre group or the morality of being a Brain Police (shades of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly?)--just goes to show how much work and thought went into this book. It's a confusing book, kind of like reading Sybil except all the characters are multiple personalities. And it's the ending--the tying up of what (might have) went before into a coherent statement--that pushes this puppy to the top.

Tired of books that insult your intelligence? This book is a challenge which matches the best fiction (not just Si-Fi) in creative thinking. Once you think you've got it figured out, there isn't just a plot twist - the whole world view shifts. I think its one of the best books written recently.