Tea from an Empty Cup
Pat Cadigan
218 pages
published in 1998

Pat Cadigan is an science fiction author I have been aware of for quite some time without ever having read any of her work, apart from the occasional short story here and there. At any given time there are enough sf authors writing that it's almost impossible to be familiar with all of them and she had slipped through the cracks. I didn't feel any great need for sampling her fiction either, but when my eye fell on this novel in the library I picked it up anyway.

Tea from an Empty Cup is somewhat of an anomaly, being as it is a scant 200+ pages in a time when most science fiction novels clock in at over 400 pages, as well as being a straight cyberpunk novel about a decade after the cyberpunk wave crested. Since I do like a good cyberpunk story and I don't mind reading a short book every now and again either, these are only points in its favour.

The story in Tea from an Empty Cup revolves around near mythical Japan, which had been destroyed in an vaguely described natural cataclysm several decades before the story opens and a virtual version of which is sort of a holy grail for certain kinds artificial reality buffs. Artificial realities, like post-holocaust New York Sitty being immensily popular, not just as a game but as a way of life.

And not just a way of life, but also of death, as New York homocide detective Konstantin discovers when she is called upon to investigate the murder of a young man in an artificial reality parlour and discovers he ddie the same way in the game as in reality... Hence she has to investigatge these new realities herself and (of course) stumbles onto something far more complicated then a mere murder case.

At the same time, in the other storyline of this novel, Yuki, a young ethnically Japanese woman is desperately looking for her boyfriend, who she fears has taken up with one Joy Flower, becoming one of Joy's Boyz, about whom a lot of not so nice rumours abound. When Yuki seeks her out, she immediatedly is taken into Joy's orbit, becoming her personal assistant, which leads her too onto a voyage of discovery towards the central mystery of the book.

The two storylines slowly mesh but stay separate, slowly revealing what happened to both the dead man and Tom, slowly creating a pattern of truth. Pat Cadigan manages to pack quite a dense complex tale in a book of such limited length, without making it a difficult book to read. Recommened if you like cyberpunk or hardboiled detectives.