Gwyneth Jones

I was born in North East Manchester, a landscape of narrow valleys, many streams, willows and poplars—overlaid with a thick crust of nineteenth and twentieth century redbrick houses, mills, factories, most of the wheels already stilled before my time. The Rottweilers didn't go around in pairs in our neighbourhood, but it was back-to-back housing and cobbled alleys, and there was a window in the bedroom I shared with my younger sister, where I could hide behind the curtain, and see a shadow girl in the night on the other side of the glass, wild and free. (I've written about my childhood, and how I think it relates to my writing, you can find the long version here.) When I was grown I went to a south coast University, where I did not have a brilliant career (I didn't do a stroke of work); but I dreamed my dreams, and read some very interesting books. Later I lived in Singapore, because my husband was teaching there: grokking the culture of the region and letting the politics sail right over my head. The Jakarta Regime was subjugating East Timor, and I met Indonesians who tried to tell me how bad it was, but I was too ignorant to understand... That's where I found my thesis, or to put it another way, I began to write science fiction. (I've written about this experience too, you can find it here.) Then we came back to England, lived in frugal content, had a child, and explored France and Italy on a shoestring. For years I never had any private money in my pocket. I wouldn't take pocket-money from my husband, and I was making less than a science post-grad. And all the while, I was writing about the battle of the sexes. Where does it come from? Why does it work the way it does? What exactly happens when the wiring of sex-typic reproductive behaviour intersects with human psychology, in all its economic, poltical, cultural ramifications...? Can something fragile and unstable as sexual difference as it really is really be the cause of so much suffering, the foundation of so many books of merciless law? Is this one of the great problems of the world? Or am I just going nuts?

The story of Anna Senoz, woman scientist of genius, is not my life story, and Anna certainly isn't me. Far, far from it! (I believe Ramone, Anna's shadow-girl, is rather closer to a self-portrait...) But in ways I think of Life as the apologia, the explanation, of my science fiction. This is the other side of the story I've written, over and over again, in the books Divine Endurance (1987), Escape Plans (1986), Kairos (1988), and the Aleutian Trilogy. This is what the story of the great divide would be like, (my version) if it was stripped of the adventure fantasy, and told in terms of real life.

Email: gwyneth.jones@ntlworld.com
Websites: Bold As Love; Gwyneth Jones