Nova Quillon

Union household, port towns, shift work. Her father was a dockworker and her mother kept the books for a marine supply, and she grew up around people whose competence was the most attractive thing about them and who would have been embarrassed to hear it said. That is where the line's blue-collar space comes from — freight, salvage, colony agriculture, med-bays and rotas, nobody an admiral — and why her human characters always have jobs they can lose and families who ring them at bad times. She is fat and has been since her twenties, and she got tired of heroines who had to shrink before a story would let anybody want them — so she writes the other version, every time.