Molly Brown is a former shoeshine girl turned barmaid turned waitress
turned d.j. turned armed guard turned hospital orderly turned cleaning
lady turned magician's assistant turned stand-up comic turned actress
turned SF writer, with at least a dozen other things in between,
including some pretty disgusting jobs you probably don't
want to know about and several long periods of unemployment. She was
born in Chicago, which probably explains everything. Though she has
lived in Britain since 1983, she still hasn't managed to lose her strange midwestern twang.
She started writing her first book - a science fiction
thriller for teenagers called "Virus" - back in 1988, during a
break in rehearsals for a play. By the time rehearsals started
up again, she'd decided she preferred writing to performing
because writing is something you can do in a bathrobe.
Virus was finally published by Point SF in the autumn of 1994.
(If she'd known it would take six years to sell the book
she probably would have stuck to being an embittered
unknown actress.)
Her first published SF story, "Bad Timing", a humorous time
travel romance, won the BSFA award for best short story of
1991. Since then, she has had between twenty and thirty
short stories published in magazines and anthologies here
and abroad.
Though SF is her one true love, she has been known to
be unfaithful upon occasion. Of her published short
stories, about half a dozen were crime and a couple
were more or less mainstream. (If pressed, she will even
admit to once having had a story published in
Woman's Own - but there were extenuating circumstances.)
Within the last couple of years, she has also written a
novelisation based on the "Cracker" television series
(Cracker: To Say I Love You, Virgin), and a humorous
historical whodunnit (Invitation To A Funeral, Gollancz).
She swears her next book will be SF.
