Joanna Lamprey

Joanna Lamprey writes SF and has a few stories published in anthologies. There are two books under the Joanna Lamprey name so far:

Time after Time is a collection of microstories plus a novella, the title story, which is about head-hopping in time. Inevitably there’s a don’t-step-on-the-butterfly moment, but it’s a top story. No, really. It is! Lucy and her team are mentally piggybacking in Neanderthals when that butterfly moment happens and changes the future, leaving them stuck in a dramatically altered reality unless they can reverse the error.

I’ll be honest – I don’t like Lucy. She’s the only character I ever created that I eye with nervous fascination, and who doesn’t reflect my usual theme of Indian summer. She’s young, thoughtless, selfish and frighteningly talented and she could be out there right now.

By contrast, I really like the Place bunch and they’d get on well with the Lawns lot, too. If, of course, they didn’t live a century or two apart in time and a light-year or two apart in space. Most of the characters fit into my conviction that late middle-age has a huge amount to offer, although the main characters are a pair of young lovers. Place is a relatively newly-colonized planet with very little to offer except types of coal unavailable anywhere else in the settled universe, and not a lot of money is being spent on its development. In fact the lifestyle is somewhere between space Western and steam punk (all that coal) and the small community has challenges which will be familiar to us from our past and present. There’s no obvious reason why they are so fascinating to the Talia, a race of humanoids watching them closely from a thousand years in the future …. this is the first book of a planned trilogy.