Pat Cadigan is an award-winning science fiction author and editor; though American-born, she lives in the United Kingdom. Her fiction is mostly classified in the cyberpunk subgenre, of which she is considered one of the founders. She has twice won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for Synners (1992) and Fools (1995), as well as a 2013 Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novelette, a World Fantasy Award, and three Locus Awards. She has also written film novelizations, including one for Cellular (2004), which starred Kim Basinger. Her writing is often marked by icy undercurrents of black humor as well as tough-minded vigor, the ingredients of the “punk” part of “cyberpunk.” Her works frequently deal with how the human mind relates to technology; she ascribes this to having had the experience of being hooked up to medical machines during recovery from surgery for a congenital heart defect at age five.
Born Patricia Oren Kearney in upstate New York in 1953, she grew up in the small town of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She pursued theater arts for a time at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on a scholarship, but went on to study science fiction and science fiction writing with Professor James Gunn at the University of Kansas. She met and married Rufus Cadigan during her college years; shortly after she graduated from the University of Kansas in 1975, they divorced. That same year, she became involved in preparations for the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention (or WorldCon) in Kansas City, Missouri. She ended up serving as liaison with author guest of honor Robert Heinlein; Heinlein later included her in the dedication of his novel Friday in recognition of their friendship. In the late 1970s, she had a job at fantasy writer Tom Reamy’s graphic design company, and then worked as a writer for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City for ten years. Concurrently, from the late seventies until the early eighties, she and her second husband, Arnie Fenner, edited two small press F/SF magazines, first Chacal, and then Shayol, which was noted for the quality of its stories.
She sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980 and continued to make short fiction sales and work on longer manuscripts while still working at a full-time day job, and then while also parenting her young son. With the success of her writing in the 1980s, she transitioned to writing full-time in 1987, the year she published her first book, Mindplayers; the novel originated in a series of four linked short stories about her heroine Deadpan Allie which Cadigan revised and expanded following their publication earlier in the eighties. In this first novel, she framed the mind as a stage for inner psychodramas in which a healer could intervene using “Dream Hacking” technology. In 1989, Patterns, a collection of her short stories, was released; it went on to win a
Locus Award the following year. She followed it up with her award-winning second novel Synners (1991), and in the next couple years, two more collections of her short fiction as well as the novel Fools. Fools envisioned a near-future environment in which memories are marketable. Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) was again based on two connected novellas she had published in the nineties, and a sequel, Dervish Is Digital, was released a couple of years later; these two works comprise the Doré Konstantin series, in which detective Konstantin learns to pursue perpetrators in cyberspace.
While on a short visit to England during the nineties, Cadigan met journalist Christopher Fowler (not to be confused with the noted UK thriller author) when he asked to interview her. He apparently made a good impression; she looked him up after her second divorce, and romance ensued. In 1996, she emigrated to London, England, with her son, Rob Fenner, and she and Fowler were married later that year. After her son had grown to an independent age, her writing took a back seat for several years due to other family obligations, of which Cadigan said in an interview, “I had to look after my elderly mother, and it wasn’t easy, even with my husband helping. As a result, for the first dozen years of the century, I could only write short fiction. My mother passed away in late 2012, and I went back to work on a novel in earnest…and then I got cancer. Go figure.” In 2014, Pat Cadigan became a citizen of the United Kingdom, where she has been a visiting lecturer on creative writing and science fiction at British universities. Mad Love (2019) which tells the origin story of DC Comics’ Harley Quinn, is a novelization created by Cadigan in collaboration with Paul Dini, one of the original creators of the character; it is set in the Gotham City of Batman fame, particularly at Arkham Asylum. As of this writing, she is working on a novel that “jumps off from the end” of her Hugo-winning novelette, 2013’s “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”; its working title is See You When You Get There.
This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.
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