CADIGAN, Pat

   Working name of US writer Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan (1953-), who began publishing sf with "Death from Exposure" for SHAYOL in 1978; this SEMIPROZINE, which she edited throughout its existence (1977-85), was remarkable both for the quality of stories it published and for its production values. She later assembled much of her best shorter work in Patterns (coll 1989), where its cumulative effect is very considerable; later stories appear in Home by the Sea (coll 1992) and Dirty Work (coll 1993). From the beginning, PC has been a writer who makes use of her venues - usually NEAR FUTURE, usually urban, and usually Californian though often intensified by a sense of windswept, prairie desolation - as highly charged gauntlets which her protagonists do not so much run as cling to, surviving somehow. It was an effect also to be found in the stories assembled in Letters from Home (coll 1991 UK) with Karen Joy FOWLER and Pat MURPHY, each contributing her own tales.Unfortunately PC's first novel, Mindplayers (fixup 1987), failed to sustain the intensity of her shorter work, treating in simplistic fashion a vision of the human mind as constituted of sequences of internal psychodramas into which a healer may literally enter, given the proper tools. The idea, which had been intensely and punishingly examined by Roger ZELAZNY in THE DREAM MASTER (1966), is not in any sense sophisticated by the can-do METAPHYSIC underlying the premise as PC described it 20 years later. Her next novel, Synners (1991), on the other hand, takes full advantage of its considerable length to translate the street-wise, CYBERPUNK involvedness of her best short fiction into a comprehensive vision-racingly told, linguistically acute, simultaneously pell-mell and precise in its detailing - of a world dominated by the intricacies of the human/ COMPUTER interface; it won the ARTHUR C. CLARKE award in 1992. The plot, which is extremely complicated, deals mainly with a disease of the interface, where computer viruses which pass for AIs are beginning to cause numerous human deaths. Like William GIBSON's cyberpunk novels - and unlike Bruce STERLING's - Synners offers no sense that the CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGHS that proliferate throughout the text will in any significant sense transform the overwhelming urbanized world, though there is some hint that the system may begin to fail through its own internal imbalances. But at the heart of Synners is the burning presence of the future. PC's third novel, Fools (1992) - which won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 1995, the first time it has been awarded twice to one writer - exercises a virtuoso concision on similar material, through examining a near future environment in which memories are marketable and promiscuously insertable, and individual brains become arenas in which various selves engage in agonistic fugues with each other. One of the most acutely intelligent of 1980s writers, PC currently seems to be learning from everything.

   JC

   Other works: My Brother's Keeper (1988 IASFM; 1992 chap).

   See also: MACHINES; PSYCHOLOGY.