Book description
Mindplayers are tomorrow's psychoanalysts, 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 supplies
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 McFlor, 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 Pathosfinding; Thrillseeking or
Dreamfeeding 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 has 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.
