What are you reading, Jenni Hill?
The future has blue hair.
Welcome back to WAYR, and happy Friday! Today we’re delighted to welcome editor Jenni Hill to the newsletter.
Jenni Hill is a Senior Commissioning Editor for Orbit Books, publishers of excellent science fiction and fantasy novels. Follow her on Twitter here!
What are you reading right now?
Several things, all at once, some of which are on my submission pile or editing stack – but on my Audible app I have The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson, a riveting murder mystery set in an 18th Century debtor’s prison.
What's the last great book you read?
Oof, you can’t ask editors that. That’s cruel. Asking me to pick between the books I’ve edited would be like trying to make a parent choose between their children, so I simply can’t pick those…
I freaking loved Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. Tamsyn is a great writer and an absolute tease when it comes to dropping hints and easter eggs in her worldbuilding; I have a groupchat that still pings with new theories every day.
What's your best advice for aspiring writers?
It’s a cliché, but write what you love, write the thing that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning. There’s not enough joy in the world, find yours and follow it. I promise readers will pick up on that.
What's the most interesting fact you've learned recently?
I’ve fallen back into podcasts in lockdown, and I got to the My Favourite Murder episode on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 – I’d never heard of it. Over one hundred seamstresses died because their supervisors had locked an exit to prevent theft. Like the story of the Radium girls, it sparked a lot of activism to change rules around health and safety and the responsibility that companies have towards their workers.
It really hit home that there are very few rights we have as workers that someone didn’t have to fight for or die for. In a month when the Tories were talking about changing the working time directive, and Elon Musk is tweeting about indentured servitude on Mars, it was pretty sobering.
What fictional universe would you live in for a year?
So many of them are so bad for the average person! I love The Expanse, Warhammer 40k, The Mandalorian right now, but you couldn’t pay me to live there.
I think I’d do okay in the She-Ra: Princesses of Power universe. I have colourful hair so I’d fit right in, and I think they’d let me take my cats. Star Trek would be fun too. I wish there was more optimistic science fiction in the world, and I’d count Trek in that rare category. In a lot of ways, I hope the future looks like Star Trek.
Thank you, Jenni!
Thank you for reading - see you next week!