Two-time Arthur C. Clarke Award winner for Best Novel, Pat Cadigan is the Queen of Cyberpunk for the brilliance of her ideas, the genius of her near-future extrapolations, and the beauty of her writing. No one else has explored and illuminated the mind-machine interface with the keen and relentless intelligence she demonstrates in her novels Mindplayers, Synners, Fools, and the long-awaited Tea from an Empty Cup. Her fourth novel is a perceptive, fascinating, witty SF mystery of artificial reality, whose paradoxical name perfectly defines its nature: an immaterial world of pure sensation, where, by legal mandate, everything is permitted and nothing is forbidden.

The hazards of Artificial Reality are spilling into the real world--people vanish and solitary gamers are found slain in sealed AR booths. The young woman Yuki, child of a Japan destroyed before her birth, enters AR as the new assistant to the mysterious celebrity Joy Flower, but with her own agenda: to find Tom Iguchi, her missing beloved, who never was her lover but had been one of Joy's Boyz. The hard-boiled homicide detective Dore Konstantin stalks the virtual streets of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty seeking a serial killer who may have murdered eight gamers from inside AR itself. But how do you find missing or hidden persons in a world where nothing is as it seems? The two plot lines subtly converge as fact and fantasy, murderer and victim, as well as understanding and identity invert in a virtual universe where the dangers are real and ever-present, and you can be anything or anyone but yourself. --Cynthia Ward


From Publishers Weekly
Artificial reality is where it's at if you're hot to party in the 21st century. Plugged-in gamers flock to such AR sites as post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty for wild cyberspace adventures. It costs a bundle to visit but it's guaranteed safe; you can die in AR and be back partying the next day. But now gamers are turning up dead in the real world, impossibly dead in locked rooms, in ways that mimic their supposedly harmless deaths on the Net. Dore Konstantin, a homicide cop with little AR experience, realizes that to solve the murders she's going to have to enter cyberspace. There she searches for the mysterious entity known as Body Sativa and, in an act of deliberate provocation, does so wearing the AR appearance of Shantih Love, the latest murder victim. Yuki Harame is also searching for someone, her missing lover who may or may not be the dead Shantih Love. Although neither Konstantin nor Yuki know of each other's existence, both have entered a dark world of online sexual perversion, and both are in deadly danger. In her first novel in five years, two-time Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Cadigan (Synners; Foods) tells a gritty and downbeat tale of multiple murders, exchanged identities and cybernetic sadomasochism. Konstantin, the embittered cop, and Yuki, the rootless nisei, are effective protagonists, but, as is often the case in Cadigan's work, the author's pyrotechnic style and intensely detailed descriptions of cyberspace are the major attractions. This well-done example of cyberpunk noir detective fiction should especially appeal to fans of William Gibson. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Cadigan's fourth novel plunges into the world of AR (artificial reality), whose visitors don "hotsuits" allowing them to sensually experience a trendy, alternative existence. Konstantin, a cop, enters AR to track down a killer, for someone or something is simultaneously killing AR avatars and, inexplicably, their flesh-and-blood counterparts. Although bringing a killer captured in AR to justice in the real world seems impossible, Konstantin, unschooled in the cyberspace culture, submerges herself in AR and discovers a lawless, frightening world. Meanwhile, in a parallel development, Yuki, another AR novice, enters it to track down her friend Tom, not knowing that he was one of the murder victims. It seems, however, that Tom has taken on another existence and now might inhabit the virtual Japan that replaced the real one, destroyed by earthquakes. Sound confusing? Despite its intriguing premise, the book is. Yet Cadigan has a way of making it believable, and fans of Alexander Besher's Mir or the movie Strange Days (1995) will enjoy Cadigan's take on cyberspace. Benjamin Segedin


From Kirkus Reviews
Near/medium-future cyberpunk yarn from the author of the paperback Fools (1992), etc., and numerous well-known stories. Artificial Reality is indistinguishable from external reality; all enthusiasts and addicts need to enter it is a ``hotsuit'' and a helmet. Police Lieutenant Dore Konstantin investigates a DOA found in an AR parlor; the victim is a 17-year-old Caucasian with a messily cut throat. In AR he called himself Shantih Love, or perhaps Tom Iguchi, though he wasn't Japanese; his favored scenario was post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty - wherein, Konstantin discovers, eight deaths have occurred in as many months. There were no witnesses, and nobody was seen to enter or leave the booth where the boy died. Meanwhile, Yuki, a full-blooded Japanese (Japan itself has been destroyed), attempts to locate her mysteriously vanished boyfriend, Tom Iguchi. She meets Tom in Noo Yawk Sitty, but he's trapped somehow in AR; worse, someone else is experiencing everything she experiences, wearing her just as she wears the hotsuit supplied by shady AR facilitator Joy Flower. Konstantin, though a novice and completely out of her depth, is also forced to enter AR in order to develop new information. She borrows the Shantih Love ID, complete with cut throat, and eventually learns that the enigmatic Body Sativa knows everything that's going on in AR. A parlor employee, it emerges, was supplying drugs to clients, enabling them to ``speed'' up to the higher levels of AR enjoyed by clubbers, manipulators, and various wannabes. Poor Yuki, meanwhile, finds she has become Joy Flower's slave. Konstantin will find it perplexing to sort out the swirl of motives and multiple identities, or even distinguish AR from reality. The murder mystery's well constructed and often absorbing - but AR is no different from VR, and the intractable problem remains: when anything can happen, how is it possible to care when something does? -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Take it to the next level! Tea from an Empty Cup is hot, fast, and savagely in control, a voyage to a realm where everything's possible and anything goes, by an author who knows the difference between what's real and what matters. Crank it up, and play it loud." --Michael Swanwick

"Cadigan's first novel in five years exhibits the author's high-impact prose style, eminently suitable for a voyage into the world of high-tech SF." --Library Journal

"A tightly plotted, crisply written novel that fits the classic noir mystery template set down by the likes of Raymond Chandler more comfortably than anything William Gibson has ever written." --Andrew Leonard, Salon Magazine



Book Description
"How can you drink tea from an empty cup?"

That ancient Zen riddle holds the key to a baffling mystery: a young man found with his throat slashed while locked alone in a virtual reality parlor.

The secret of this enigmatic death lies in an apocalyptic cyberspace shadow-world where nothing is certain, and even one's own identity can change in an instant.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Yuki, a lost soul in a sprawling urban jungle, loses her lover in the seamy underground of chic cybersex clubs and kinky designer dreams, and Konstantin, a hardened cop, is called to the scene of a mysterious death: a young punk in a locked Artificial Reality booth, his throat slashed without any signs of a struggle. There have been other such deaths while in AR, and rumors of a new level in the game where those deaths occurred. To discover the truth behind a spreading web of lies and darkness, Yuki and Konstantin must make harrowing journeys into the dark heart of cyberspace - to an apocalyptic artificial world where virtual violence can be as deadly as the real thing and ancient Asian gods conspire to bring a nightmarish new reality to life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Near/medium-future cyberpunk yarn from the author of the paperback Fools (1992), etc., and numerous well-known stories. Artificial Reality is indistinguishable from external reality; all enthusiasts and addicts need to enter it is a "hotsuit" and a helmet. Police Lieutenant Dore Konstantin investigates a DOA found in an AR parlor; the victim is a 17-year-old Caucasian with a messily cut throat. In AR he called himself Shantih Love, or perhaps Tom Iguchi, though he wasn't Japanese; his favored scenario was post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sittyþwherein, Konstantin discovers, eight deaths have occurred in as many months. There were no witnesses, and nobody was seen to enter or leave the booth where the boy died. Meanwhile, Yuki, a full-blooded Japanese (Japan itself has been destroyed), attempts to locate her mysteriously vanished boyfriend, Tom Iguchi. She meets Tom in Noo Yawk Sitty, but he's trapped somehow in AR; worse, someone else is experiencing everything she experiences, wearing her just as she wears the hotsuit supplied by shady AR facilitator Joy Flower. Konstantin, though a novice and completely out of her depth, is also forced to enter AR in order to develop new information. She borrows the Shantih Love ID, complete with cut throat, and eventually learns that the enigmatic Body Sativa knows everything that's going on in AR. A parlor employee, it emerges, was supplying drugs to clients, enabling them to "speed" up to the higher levels of AR enjoyed by clubbers, manipulators, and various wannabes. Poor Yuki, meanwhile, finds she has become Joy Flower's slave. Konstantin will find it perplexing to sort out the swirl of motives and multiple identities, or even distinguish AR fromreality. The murder mystery's well constructed and often absorbingþbut AR is no different from VR, and the intractable problem remains: when anything can happen, how is it possible to care when something does?