Mindplayers - Softcover

Cadigan, Pat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553265857 ISBN 13: 9780553265859

Publisher: Bantam USA, 1987

Synopsis

Caught experimenting with technologically induced psychosis, Alexandra Victoria Haas is given a choice between prison or becoming a pathosfinder

About this title

From the Author:

First novel by Pat Cadigan, "Queen of Cyberpunk".
Pat Cadigan's first novel was Mindplayers, published in November 1987 by Bantam Spectra in the United States, and by Gollancz in the United Kingdom.

Mindplayers are tomorrow's psychoanlaysts, linked directly to their patients using sophisticated machinery attached to the optic nerve. In one-to-one Mindplay contact, you can be inside someone else's head, wandering the landscapes of their consciousness. Allie is a sensation-seeking young woman, obtaining illicit thrills from her shady friend Jerry Wirerammer. But Allie goes badly astray when Jerry suplies her with a "madcap" - a device that lets you temporarily and harmlessly experience psychosis. There's something wrong with Jerry's madcap, and the psychosis doesn't go away when it's disconnected. Allie ends up undergoing treatment at a "dry-cleaner", and she is faced with a stark choice - jail, for her illegal use of the madcap; or training to become a Mindplayer herself.

During training Allie becomes familiar with the Pool - a cohesive, though shifting mental landscape jointly constructed by a number of minds; and more disturbingly encounters McFloy, who has been mind-wiped, so that his adult body is inhabited by a mind only two hours old. And as a fully-fledged Mindplayer Allie has to choose between the many specialist options open to her - Reality Affixing or Pathsofinding; Thrillseeking or Dreamfeeding...

Mindplayers is a remarakably accomplished first novel, from an author who had already established a formidable reputation for her short stories. Written in a hard-edged modern style which will appeal to readers of William Gibson, Mindplayers "does a terrific job describing the interior landscapes of the minds we visit ... rich and imaginative"(Locus).

"Excellent stuff, perceptive, imaginative, subtle and penetrating. A pleasure to read, and a writer to admire" Analog

"Cadigan's novel is an energetic, intriguing, darkly humorous head-trip extravaganza" Fantasy Review

Mindplayers is being published by Gollancz in its classic yellow-jacket format, as a "C format" (trade) paperback. It has been unavailable for some years.

Mindplayers was Pat Cadigan's first novel. She went on to write Synners and Fools (both of which won the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year in the UK). She followed these novels with Tea from an Empty Cup (1998), and has a new novel from Macmillan entitled Dervish is Digital, due in October 2000.

Pat Cadigan is also the author of many short stories, some of which have been collected in Patterns, Dirty Work and Home by the Sea.

Pat lives and works in London.

About the Author:

Pat Cadigan (1953 -)Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, NY, and grew up in Fitchburg, MA. Attending the University of Massachusetts on a scholarship, she eventually transferred to the University of Kansas where she received her degree. Since embarking on her career as a fiction writer in 1987, her Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated short stories have appeared in such magazines as Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine as well as numerous anthologies. Her first collection, Patterns, was honoured the Locus Award in 1990, and she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992 and 1995 for her novels Synners and Fools. Pat Cadigan moved to the UK in 1996 and now lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam USA
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0553265857
• ISBN 13: 9780553265859
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 10