The Life of A Trans Sci-Fi Writer

Hi all! Below is a reposting of some book reviews I wrote for my Goodreads page. I hope they're useful! Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (5/5 stars) I've got to be honest from the get-go: Gideon the Ninth is amazing! This is the best book I've read in YEARS! The main characters are all so perfectly crafted, and you love them all, even if the titular Gideon is, in the words of author Tamsyn Muir 'a dickhead'. The writing just leaps off the page and never gets in the way of the story it's trying to tell. It's written with such sharp humour, too, that I was often caught laughing out loud on the bus. I would kill to be able to write like that! The universe that the story takes place within is incredibly original; I've only ever read stories where necromancy is featured as 'that thing you NEVER do', until, of course, somebody goes and does it, with catastrophic consequences. In the world of Gideon, however, necromancy is the only magic game in town, an

Throughout 2017 and 2018, I worked on a translation of the French sci-fi book ‘Un Roman dans la planète Mars’ by André Laurie (A Story of the Planet Mars, available to buy on Amazon at this link here ). It is an old novella, first published in 1895, that had long ceased to be within copyright. My hope was that if I could translate a book which was out of copyright, I could then look for a specialist publisher who might be interested in putting it out. Then, I would have a genuine bona-fide published book out in the world, and I thought that this might be enough of a proven portfolio of work to allow me to convince publishers to let me translate their contemporary French works.  However, the response I got from every publisher was exactly the same: ‘The book is too short, so it’s not worth us putting it out by itself. Novellas just don’t sell very well, particularly ones as niche as this.’ I did convince one publisher to let me translate another one of Laurie’s works which could then be