Do you consider yourself a feminist?

Yes, absolutely.
But I also want to live in a world where the word ‘feminist’ is explained as the word ‘suffragette’. Which is the name for the women at the turn of the 20th century who were fighting for vote. That’s my dream for feminism. It’s that it becomes like suffragette and evolutionist, and things like that. Yes, I’m an evolutionist.
Things take a long time. However by this time next century women and the world may be more or less unrecognisable to the people who live here now, in terms of the changing social order and roles, and things like that. I can see in the future. For example, in America, and this is something I’ve been working on in things that I’m writing – America has been very resistant to becoming a surveillance society – you know, close circuit video cameras everywhere – and London, where I live, has cameras all over so that they can follow people from camera to camera, and I can see a time in the future when the head-to-toe chador could be considered a privacy device for both men and women, whereas Western women, and particularly American women, see the chador as a symbol of oppression. Many of my Islamic women friends see the chador as liberating. You put it on and you don’t have to worry about appealing to men or cleaning.

When you started writing cyberpunk, were you aware you were writing cyberpunk?

I’ve always written exactly what I’ve been interested in. So the short answer is ‘no’.

Were you aware that cyberpunk was considered a sexist literature?

Yes, I was. People kept pointing that out to me, and everyone had their own reasons for it. People were upset by cyberpunk, because it came out of the blue. Science fiction is actually a field that has a great deal of tradition in it and cyberpunk did not really spring from anyone’s particular tradition. So there was initially a resistance to it that way. And so many people who didn’t understand it, sought to invalidate it and they found various ways of invalidating it. One of those ways was: ‘Well, it’s just all guys’. And at the time, I wasn’t very well known, and I have an ambiguous name.
And there were a few people, a few writers who should have known better, who made statements in public like: the only reason that Pat Cadigan is considered among them is because she’s their friend and they like her.
At the time there really wasn’t another woman writing quite that way. Now I’m starting to see work coming out from women authors that is kind of fit to the description. There’s Tricia Sullivan, and her last two novels, one novel called Maul and her latest novel is called Double Vision, and it’s not so cyberpunk that it seems anachronistic, it’s not like something that should have been published twenty years ago, but it’s very much in the spirit of it.

So you don’t think that there was a ‘reaction’ element?

Sure, sure. And that’s actually one of the things that stimulated, or instigated the cyberpunk movement and all of us were writers with similar points of view reacting against that sort of things.
It’s a bit difficult to explain also, because it is such an American phenomenon, you know, we were all lefties who were reacting against the “white guys” science fiction, you know, like white guys in space. It seemed like all the scientists were men, all the astronauts were men, all the aliens on the other planets were men. There was not so much extrapolation as taking the accepted social order and giving that a few pops in the future. Science fiction was actually very short-sighted in that way. And the example just at the top of my head is in Soylent Green, which was from a Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room Make Room. They have this overcrowded future, where resources are scarce and in the social order women come with the acquirement, and women are referred to as furniture. Wow! What future was that? And what planet did it take place on? And it was made at a time when it was more about Hollywood “let’s make this to make it seem a little strange”. But in terms of actually working hard to extrapolate something…
Just one thing that a lot of science fiction missed was the effect of widely available birth control and women’s changing roles in society. Most science fiction missed that completely.