“I swear they told me I was terminal...but that was back in December 2014. What can I say? Heaven doesn’t want me and Hell’s afraid I’ll take over.”
Pat Cadigan won the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice for her novels Synners and Fools, and the Scribe Award three times for Best Novelisation, most recently for Ultraman. She has also won three Locus Awards––best short story for "Angel," best collection for Patterns, and best novelette for "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi,", which also won the Hugo Award and Japan's Seiun Award; it can be found in Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Most often identified as one of the original cyberpunk writers––the Guardian called her The Queen of Cyberpunk––her work includes fantasy, horror, young adult, and nonfiction.
Born in New York, she grew up in Massachusetts but spent most of her adult life in the Kansas City area, where she worked for ten years at Hallmark Cards, Inc., writing greeting cards, often in perfect iambic pentameter. She now lives in gritty, urban north London with her husband Chris Fowler, and takes pride in the accomplishments of her son, musician, composer, data scientist, and nonfiction writer Robert Fenner.
Along with her media tie-in writing, Cadigan is working on two new original novels––working titles: See You When You Get There and Truth & Bone––while she makes terminal cancer her bitch. Diagnosed in late 2014 with an inoperable and incurable form of recurrent endometrial cancer, she was given at most two years to live. After she underwent what was supposed to have been strictly palliative chemotherapy in early 2015, however, doctors were forced to revise their estimates from 'two years or less' to 'Someday, maybe––hey, we just work here'.
When asked for comment, Cadigan, who has already returned from the dead after a severe case of anaphylactic shock, said, “Each of us was put on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. I’m now so far behind that I can never die.”
She has been keeping a Wordpress blog called 'Ceci N'est Pas Une Blog––Dispatches From Cancerland' about her adventures as a cancer patient; she promises that it's not a bummer. In fact, some of it is even funny. She can also be found on Facebook and tweets as @cadigan and just about everything there is funny, too.
Cadigan was proud to do the novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay for what would have been the third Aliens movie, published 31 August 2021. (Spoiler Alert: it’s not the third Aliens movie that you saw in the theatre, on video, or in your nightmares.) In fact, Gibson did two drafts of the screenplay; this novelisation is his first draft. The second draft was very different and was adapted as a graphic novel by Dark Horse, starring the fabulous artwork of Johnny Christmas. Cadigan thinks you should own both, because.
Her latest works are Ultraman and Ultraseven, novelisations of the legendary Japanese superheroes from Nebula M73. Ultraman came out in 2023, while Ultraseven is scheduled for early 2025. If you’re unfamiliar with Ultraman, watch for the upcoming Ultraman documentary, coming soon from Japanese public television.
Thanks to Gollancz’s highly successful Gateway eBook program, all of Cadigan’s original novels are available electronically. Other books, such the two making-of movie books she was commissioned to write—The Making of Lost in Space and The Resurrection of the Mummy—are available through third-party sellers. Support independent and second-hand book-dealers whenever possible. You can’t get everything in electronic format. Also, before eBooks came along, second-hand book dealers prevented many good writers from disappearing altogether. Ebooks are great because you can take hundreds of them with you on an airplane without worrying about the weight allowance but it’s still great to have a book signed by your favourite author.
As a cancer patient (remember, she’s not in remission, just stubborn), Cadigan spent 2020 at home, thanks to the inconvenience of a global pandemic. She got a lot of writing done, but not a lot of housework, because seriously? Are you kidding? Sightings continued to be scarce during 2021. Cadigan hoped to get around more in 2022 but didn’t.
In 2020, she was nominated for the Scribe Award for Alita Battle Angel, and was delighted when she won. She says that her editor, Ella J Chappell was crucial in helping her produce her best work possible. Like Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois, Ms Chappell has become a lasting influence on Cadigan’s work in general.
In 2022, she was again nominated for the Scribe Award for Alien 3, the novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced screenplay. Nominees and winners were announced at the San Diego Comic Con and to her even greater delight, she won again. And in 2024, she was overjoyed to win a third time for Ultraman. She has had superb editorial support from Titan Books.
A full list of Scribe Award winners is available at the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers website.
