locusmag 0 Comments BETHANY JACOBS was born August 31, 1982 in Redlands CA and grew up in San Jose. She went on to earn a PhD in American Literature from the University of Oregon in 2014, where she taught writing and science fiction. She left academia in 2019 to work in educational technology to have more time to write. Her debut novel, These Burning Stars (2023), became a 2024 Philip K. Dick Award winner and a Dragon, BSFS, and Locus Award finalist. She was also a finalist for the World Science Fiction Association’s Astounding Award. Jacobs has continued the space opera trilogy The Kindom with On Vicious Worlds, published in 2024, and This Brutal Moon, forthcoming in December 2025. Excerpt from the interview: “I was born in Redlands CA, but pretty much my whole childhood and teenage years I was in San Jose. Now I live in Buffalo NY. When I was a kid, I have very clear memories of my mom reading us series like The Chronicles of Narnia. I was a big reader, very imaginative kid, so I was reading Madeleine L’Engle’s and Brian Jacques’s books. I was reading predominantly fantasy, I would say, but we were also big Star Trek people, so I was watching Star Trek every day. I started writing when I was seven, so one of my books was a rip-off of The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, and one of my books was a rip-off of that ’80s movie Explorers. I both consumed and wrote in those genres for a very long time. In my later high school years, and when I went to college, I got super pretentious, so I started writing literary fiction – not there’s anything wrong with literary fiction, but mine weren’t good! Then, in my late 20s, I returned to sci-fi, and it was just kind of like, ‘Yeah, this is it, this is who I am.’ So, that’s what I’ve been writing ever since. “When I was in college, I had a book that made some minor steps. I won an award to go to the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference, and I made some overtures to literary agents and things like that, but I wasn’t good enough yet. I think that’s something that a lot of writers aren’t comfortable talking about. So many writers get on the scene young, they start publishing when they’re in their early 20s, and God bless them, a lot of that work is amazing! But when I look at my writing from my early 20s, it just wasn’t good enough. I’d be embarrassed for it to be published now. “After I finished college I went into graduate school, so for ten years of my life I was focusing on getting my PhD and writing scholarship. I was still writing fiction, but it was like a thing that I found time to do once a week, just with how busy I was between teaching and studying and all of that.” Source: https://locusmag.com/feature/bethany-jacobs-your-vision-of-revolution/