Pat Cadigan (1953– ) is a US science fiction writer associated with the cyberpunk movement who has won two Arthur C. Clarke Awards and a Hugo Award. From the beginning, Cadigan focused on near-future, usually urban, and usually Californian settings, often intensified by a sense of windswept, prairie desolation—and used them as highly charged gauntlets that her protagonists do not so much run through as cling to, surviving somehow. Certainly her immersion of her female protagonists in traditionally masculine venues has been useful in subverting some tropes of the subgenre. In addition to writing cyberpunk fiction, Cadigan edited the anthology The Ultimate Cyberpunk in 2002, an attempt to show historical antecedents and also provide examples of contemporary cyberpunk stories.
Cadigan’s first novel, Mindplayers (1987), blurred the line between objective reality and subjective experience. Her second novel, Synners (1991), expands upon this idea and constituted a breakthrough for the author. Synners translates the cyberpunk aspects of her best short fiction into a comprehensive vision—linguistically acute, simultaneously pell-mell and precise in its detailing—of a world dominated by the intricacies of the human/computer interface. The plot, which is extremely complicated, is an early exploration of the interface disease trope, where computer viruses that pass for artificial intelligence are beginning to cause numerous human deaths and to fragment human identity.
Cadigan’s work has increasingly seemed to be prescient, in some part through the sense of entrapment it conveys. Like William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels—and unlike Bruce Sterling’s—Synners offers no sense that the technological breakthroughs in the story will in any significant sense transform the overwhelmingly urbanized world, though there is some hint that the system may begin to fail through its own internal imbalances.
She began publishing short fiction with “Death from Exposure,” in the second issue of Shayol (1978), a much-lauded magazine Cadigan edited throughout its existence (1977–85). She later assembled much of her best shorter work in Patterns (1989), with later stories appearing in Home by the Sea (1992) and Dirty Work: Stories (1993). Most of these collected stories were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Omni.
“Variation on a Man” (Omni, 1984) is classic Cadigan cyberpunk and later became part of her novel Mindplayers.