Tag: Pat Cadigan

‘Pretty Boy Crossover’ by Pat Cadigan

He forgets everything, the girl, the Rude Boy, the Mohawk, them on the stairs, and plunges through the crowd toward the screen. People fall away from him as though they were re-enacting the Red Sea. He dives for the screen, for Bobby, not caring how it must look to anyone. What would they know about it, any of them. He can’t remember in his whole sixteen years ever hearing one person say, I love my friend. Not Bobby, not even himself.

Another story about society’s relationship to technology, and a story about what it means to be human. The unnamed viewpoint character is offered the opportunity to become immortal through digitization, and he refuses. I’m fairly sure I would also refuse, but not for the same reasons. Would sixteen-year-old me have refused?

First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1986. Collected in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, 2010; and The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Vintage, 2023

‘The Power and the Passion’ by Pat Cadigan

I suppose that if there is an undercurrent to this little list – other than an obvious I-like-genre-stuff slant – it might be authors who have maybe been unfairly overlooked by the Cool Kids of Culture. Pat Cadigan fits the bill. Pat is hardly unknown in science fiction, but I don’t think she’s ever quite received the due she deserves for formulating some of the stuff that the Gibsons and Sterlings and Stephensons have been (rightly) celebrated for. She is also a versatile writer.

‘The Power and the Passion’ is a vampire story. With a twist. Like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (♫‘Two great tastes in one candy bar…’♫), it brings together a pair of great monsters: vampires and serial killers. 

(Of course, Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein combined three great monsters way back in 1948. But I digress. And perhaps offer too many parenthetical asides.) 

Cadigan’s voice here – a first person, very disturbing, psychopathic killer with a secret up his sleeve – is rip-roaring fun. The tale is a thrill ride, yes, but she also has a serious point to make about who and what is monstrous in this world. Not always so easy to know, is it?

First published in Patterns, Ursus, 1989