Fools, by Pat Cadigan

First published in the US in 1992, and in the UK in 1994, Fools by Pat Cadigan won the Clark Award for best science-fiction novel in 1995. My SF Masterworks edition is from 2019 and features an introduction by Tricia Sullivan, another Clark Award winner.

The blurb on this edition is as follows:

“When Marva, a Method actress, wakes up in the hologram pool of a private club, dressed head to toe in expensive new clothes, and carrying more money than she’s seen in years, it’s clear something has gone very wrong.

The murder she now remembers can’t be good new either.

Finding herself pursued by deadly assassins, and starting to question evert facet of her identity, Marva must venture deep into the Downs of the city to unravel the mystery of what is happening to her. One thing, though, is abundantly clear:

This will be her most difficult role yet.”

That makes it sound relatively straightforward, but the book itself plunges us into a dizzying, noisy world where people can swap memories and so alter their personalities and who they are. There’s also a trade in emotional states such as paranoia, and a whole load of weird subcultures and fetishes, like the “onionhead” couples who beat up people they think have intruded on their own relationships. 

As we navigate all this, and the twisty plot, our narrator’s different personae are indicated by different typefaces. The mystery that unfolds is them trying to piece together the jumbled fragments of memory to suss out who they really are. 

The book is divided into three sections, and for much of Part 1, “Fool to Remember” (pp. 1-156) I struggled to keep up with all the mind-switching, and the densely rich cyberpunk setting. I think that’s rather the point — we’re as much lost as the protagonist.

In Part II, “Fool to Believe” (pp. 157-251), our protagonist receives a set of memories to change her persona, enabling her to go undercover in the mean streets of the Downs. Code words and getting hit can trigger a switch to the primary persona, so we flick back and forth between the two  personalities as things get more tense and dangerous. It builds and builds, and pays off really well.

Part III, “Nobody’s Fool” (pp. 253-299) is almost a coda, picking up on events some time later, but reveals things are not quite as we’d thought. It’s difficult to say more without spoiling things.

Along the way, there’s lots of stuff about the logistics of swapping and stealing memories. For example, there are mindwipes available for purchase to free people of difficult memories. But there are also predatory kinds of mindwipe, and the narrator likens this “mindsuck” to a kind of living death:

“A mindsuck is interred not in a grave but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the time, however, it’s only spottily reminiscent of the person that has been, as though the suck has freed an auxiliary person that had always been there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality. There was still a lot of controversy between the behaviorists and the biologists over that and plenty of theories but no clear-cut explanation.” (p. 161)

More than anything, Fools sparked my own vivid memories of the 1990s when I read loads of science-fiction of this kind, eating up the shared consciousness stuff in books by Philip K Dick and the VR puterspace that was prevalent in the Doctor Who New Adventures. Small details here and there are evidence of the time in which it was written: there’s a character told he can’t smoke in a theatre (p. 87) and a reference to “net-mail” (p. 89). It’s a story set in a near-future that is now a 30-year-distant past.

In her introduction, Tricia Sullivan asks why this and Cadigan’s other work haven’t been made into blockbuster films when “so many lesser works [of science-fiction] have” (p. xi). I’m not sure how you’d make this kind of story work on the screen given that it’s all about being in the head of the main character, or characters (but all in the same head). 

But I think it could work on audio, with different actors playing the different personae inside the same head.

Me on some other Clarke Award winners:

• Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer (winner 2025) 
• Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman (winner 2023) 
• The Animals in that Country, by Laura Jean McKay (winner 2021)
• The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell (winner 2020) 
• Rosewater, by Tade Thomson (winner 2019) 
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (winner 2017) 
• The Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (winner 2016) 
• The City & the City, by China Mieville (winner 2009)

(I’ve read much more of them, but don’t seem to have posted my thoughts. What a villain.)