Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan (October 2016)

[Outis]

Since a group member has posted a review for the last group read, I figured it might be worth airing a few issues.
If anyone wants to discuss the book generally, I'm up for that but for now I'll stick to what I figure pertains to the group.
Now, this doesn't strike me a very feminist book and I don't know why it was proposed for a group read. So if I'm missing something, please let me know! Here's what I managed to gather:

Most obviously, there's the author's thesis according to which people crave power, especially abusive power over others.
As modern life generally and virtual worlds in particular strip away the social environment we're adapted to, allow us to live in fantasies and to remake ourselves as we see fit, she doesn't envision some kind of liberation from material and biological limitations bringing about virtual communism and enabling people to transcend gender, race and so forth.* She supposes instead religion, sex and so forth would cease to interest us as we would seek to become gods onto ourselves and invent more sophisticated way to exert power over others.
The book indeed features proeminently an innovative and more profound way to rape which has a hidden purpose as well as a consensual counterpart. Gender is not necessarily irrelevant but men seem to be victims more often than not which makes it less gross. I'm being vague because this is spoilerish but I got the impression that she was trying to tap into some kind of phobia which doesn't speak to me. Maybe someone grokked it and could explain...

Also, most of the characters are women. Yawn. Maybe that was somewhat remarkable back in the day.
I thought both POV characters were obsessed with men but, reading Levi's review, I wonder if it was merely my assumption that the object of one of these obsessions is a man. That would be kind of interesting. In any case, while I have no problem with such obsessions in principle, this book makes so much of them I found the whole thing grating and un-feminist.
People do play a different gender in the book's MMORPG. Yawn again. It was amused instead by other social lines that people cross with their characters.

* She does not however suppose that we would lose interest in accumulating and trading trinkets (who benefits from that is the book's most glaring blindspot by the way as it's not her characters who have fashioned themselves into god but some crass business which she fashioned into a blind but greedy watchmaker).

[Akiva ꙮ]

I didn't even realize this was a group read last month! Whoops. My review was purely by chance.

The fact that not only are most of the characters women but the *villains* are women too is still unusual enough to be remarked on, sadly. It's hard to think of many (any?) other books where that's the case. (Is Body Sativa a villain? Can't actually tell....)

I like your point about the body takeover being a kind of rape. BUT, other than body takeover, there's no sexual menace at all, despite a high level of overall violence. I didn't put that together until just now.

It helps that I was tipped off to the queer reading of Konstantin by the friend who lent it to me at the same time as Trouble and Her Friends and Slow River. See also my review of Seeing I, which features the most cryptic possible way of confirming what the authors had been hinting about Sam for the entire series but never were allowed to say outright. So much of queer reading life is reading way, way, way too much into the subtext. :)

[Outis]

I thought the social angle of the book was in line with some people ideas about not only computer games but porn and such, namely that sexual and competitive drives are being sublimed through over-exposure into domination drives which may indeed not be overtly sexual.

I'm kind of partial to the ambiguities of the book (though I think that'd have required the unambiguous stuff to make more sense) but I thought it was pretty clear Body Sativa ain't supposed to be a villian.

It's fitting that the one group member who posted a review of the BotM did so accidentally. :-)
In case you haven't lurked on past threads, the last batch of group reads was scheduled with little regard for participation and now people aren't participating because they're assuming no one else will.
Since there is still some interest for doing group reads in principle, I'm hoping to set up better-planned and less frequent reads. The first step is coming up with suitable works so if you have any suggestions, they'd be welcome: https://www.goodreads.com/group/books...
I orginally wanted to set up a Goodreads list but it looks like that's not going to work out so I thought about using a group shelf instead. You should be able to add books to that shelf and optionally add comments. I just added a few different things for illustration. I'll announce this properly later but if you want to be the first to try this thing, go ahead and tell me if there's something Goodreads doesn't let you do!

[Alexa]

My predominant reaction to this was how much I felt, as a reader, I was being held at a distance. I experienced it more as a viewing rather than a reading. The language, the meaningless of most of the interactions, and (for me at least) the pointlessness of the ending. At times the pictures did catch my interest, but then things would get tedious again. I did get the impression that all sorts of references were going right over my head, but I just didn't care enough to track them down.

[Outis]

Holding at a distance, being held at distance, meaninglessness and pointlessness... well, that's pretty much the life of (most of) the book's characters.
But there is such a thing as overdoing it. When the premise is alienated folks playing games in VR, I don't think there's much of a point in adding layers of mid-century angst on the top of that.

[Alexa]

The question is, can one write about alienated folks playing games, without alienating one's readers with those games? (And the answer is obviously yes, only Pat Cadigan didn't succeed in doing so.)

[Outis]

Agreed, but on the other hand there is literary value in alienating one's readers in order to convey something. This is cyberpunk after all. How much is too much is a matter of taste I suppose.