The cross-genre queen

Sentient starships being attacked, illegal terraforming of planets, illegal construction facilities on a sentient planet, illegal dumping of toxic waste.  These are the topics I've dealt with in some of my SF novels, and at first it's hard to see what they have in common.

But they all contain crimes, in many of my books very big crimes.  Crimes against a planet, or attempted murder of other sentient species.  And yet until recently I've always seen my work as pure SF. 

Perhaps one of the reasons my books haven't been picked up by publishers in the past is because they lay in that no-woman's-land of cross-genre.  Yes, I was writing in the future, and yes, my books contained future tech, but they were also about people doing things they shouldn't, things that were morally wrong.

When I look back on some of my earlier works I see in Snowbird illegal terraforming, and the attempted murder of a sentient starship.  In my novel Jade the whole planet is sentient.  Humans want to come in and destroy its intelligence by mining the Fire Crystal that stores the planet's memories for starship drives.  In Eyemind, the crime is using illegal subliminals to cause people to self-harm.

I've always been the cross-genre queen.  There's as much crime in my books as there is SF.  And in the past that's been a problem. Nobody wanted books that fit awkwardly between two genres.  

Thankfully, that's now changing, and cross-genre books are everywhere.  And I now have a label for what I write, thanks to Angry Robot.  I'm now a future crime writer.  The cross-genre queen by rules.