PAT CADIGAN

The first dame of cyberpunk looks back over her life and career

- Jonathan Wright

BY HER OWN ESTIMATION, PAT CADIGAN IS “a little old lady”. If this brings forth images of doilies, rocking chairs and sprigs of lavender in bedding drawers, forget it, because Cadigan comes across as a tough cookie. Take her attitude towards living with terminal cancer.

“I have outlived my projected departure date by, let me see, five years now,” she says. “I’m not in remission – my cancer doesn’t go into remission. Many recurrent cancers don’t, and this is a recurrent cancer. But the thing is, I feel really good. I certainly don’t feel like someone who is ill.”

Her work rate reflects this. Now aged 68, she continues to produce books and stories on a regular basis, most recently a novelisation of fellow cyberpunk William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for Alien3. This is a very different vision to that committed to film during an infamously troubled production.

“If they’d filmed the script,” she says, “Alien3 wouldn’t have left such a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. His script is so intelligent, it really is.” The cyberpunk writers were “big fans” of Alien and its sequel. Cadigan especially liked the way the films showed “the men and the women working as equals”.