With only two months to go until the official publication date of 26 May 2026, today I got to hold an advanced copy of the finalised book! Hardie Grant Children's Publishing sent it in a very awesome black box, wrapped up in beautiful native flower wrapping. What a joy to receive! And

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Author Spotlight: Queer Cyberpunk Author Stefanie Carter (AKA Wayward Sparx/Fox N. Locke)

I’m an AuDHD trans femme enby (they/them) who writes queer genre fiction under the pen names Fox N. Locke and Wayward Sparx. An on again off again journalist, poet, comms professional, and amateur romancer of mech pilots.

Author Links:

Website: foxenlock.com

Bluesky: @foxenlock.bsky.social

Samples of Work: Samples for all my books can be found via my website – foxenlock.com – by clicking on the relevant book title.
For Trans_lucent click here.

Book Club/Reader Book Pitch for TRANS_LUCENT:
A collection of cyberpunk stories carving space out for Trans+ characters in near-futures ravaged by rampant capitalism, terminal environmental decline, state surveillance, poverty, and the rolling back of human rights.

Welcome to Stefanie Carter, writing as Fox N. Locke and Wayward Sparx, who is currently working on a nonfiction cyberpunk book, but who is here to talk about their Sci-Fi collection, Trans_Lucent. First of all, can you tell us what prompted the creation of a collection of stories with trans+ characters, and why pick Sci-Fi as your genre for this (instead of, say, fantasy or horror)?  

Thanks for having me! I’ve loved cyberpunk almost as long as I can remember, but it was galvanised after watching The Matrix at the tender age of eight. In the aftermath, I wrote short stories that either flirted with cyberpunk themes or were out and out love letters.

It wasn’t until coming out as trans a few years ago that I started reading more trans authors and discovered a cache of incredible stories centring people like me. Aubrey Wood’s incredible Bang Bang Bodhisattva was like a lightning rod and has become one of my favourite books. I then embarked on my own trans cyberpunk story which became ‘Cumulative Realities’.

At the time, the intention was to try and get it in a magazine, but I quickly realised I had enough scattered shorts that I could redraft and refine to put a collection together. Some of them took so much rewriting they may as well have been new stories (think Ship of Theseus) while others were more effortless.

In particular was ‘Risingson’, co-written with my partner (Trans+ and disability advocacy journalist, William Elisabeth Cuthbert).

And then there’s ‘Venus as a T-Boy, Saturn as a Femme’ which started life as a novel but ended up becoming a short instead. It never occurred to me to tell these stories any other way, because cyberpunk not only provides a common language for Trans+ and queer readers, but is a perfect vehicle through which to explore transness in worlds that are becoming increasingly like our own. It’s such a great way to position allegory alongside explicit representation and get underneath big existential themes.

What sort of Trans+ rep can readers expect to find within the collection, and how did you develop these characters, were there sensitivity readers involved in the process etc?

I knew from the get-go I wanted to try and include a broad cross section of people in these stories, both in terms of gender identity but also racial backgrounds.

As an English writer, I’m also always keen to reflect the country around me. It would be so dishonest and unrealistic to not include people from Indian, Caribbean, or Eastern European backgrounds, for example.

A lot of this stems from lived experience, first and second hand. I’m trans femme and my partner is trans masc, we’re both non-binary, so it’s only natural those identities would crop up in the stories. But I wanted to reflect the wider Trans+ community as much as I can with characters whose gender expression fall outside of my own, incorporating things like neopronouns which aren’t something I personally use.

Shani, from the final story, might be my favourite character in the collection and fae’s a computer wizard with Caribbean heritage, a Brummy accent, and a love for football. All but one of the stories are set from a Trans+ perspective.

‘Progeny’ follows finance professional Alana Khoury, of Middle Eastern heritage, who grapples with reproductive rights and motherhood in a near-future where birth is strictly controlled by government programmes. The story is framed around the fallout of a terror attack committed by her progeny, who illegally left the programme, transitioned and became pregnant herself.

A lot of how I approach writing characters this far outside of my own experience is cumulative. I’ve worked with sensitivity readers on other projects, lived and worked alongside people from different backgrounds, read as much as I can, and pay attention. Some aspects are meticulously researched, finding first hand accounts, and some is approached from a position of empathy and intuition. I think belonging to any kind of minority group enables you to have a greater level of awareness for others – but by no means a full and total understanding of their lives. These are different, albeit often intersecting, experiences and backgrounds, and I’d never pretend or assume authority or total knowledge.

Do/How do these stories reflect present-day realities and anxieties for trans people and the wider queer community, and can you give some examples of these from the story premises/what inspired each story?

At its best, I think cyberpunk – and sci-fi more broadly – must reflect modern day realities and anxieties. Without, you end up with empty aesthetic and a story propelled only by superficial vibes. The stories are therefore filled with modern concerns around trans rights, bodily autonomy, and the power of community.

The most explicit here are the collection’s first and last stories. ‘Cumulative Realities’ is named after the Marsha P. Johnson quote that opens the story and is all about the importance, safety, and power of community alongside the need to preserve queer and trans art, otherwise it’ll be lost. It’s something we’re already seeing taking place as creators struggle to get their work seen and huge swathes of the internet are banning queer content on pornographic grounds. I’m trying to buy as many physical trans books as I can as part of an ongoing preservation project. There are decades of stories at risk of being lost if we don’t all try and help.

The final story, ‘Venus as a T-Boy, Saturn as a Femme’, made one reviewer so anxious they had to stop reading. But it was about an England where it’s flat-out illegal to be trans, so I knew it had to be heavy going. We’re already seeing things moving in this direction, so it wasn’t a stretch to imagine.

How does your collection approach themes of transhumanism & bodily autonomy, and within the fictional worlds of the stories, how are these aspects of selfhood developed and understood both within community contexts, and in isolation as something individual and personal?

The most explicit example of transhumanism and bodily autonomy is in ‘Risingson’ which concerns a trans masc cyborg called Calder.

As a cobbled together collection of parts, what does it mean to feel misaligned with the assigned – or remembered – gender of those parts? What does it mean to be trans when you’ve gone beyond the parameters of being human?

The scene in which Calder talks about exactly that was incredibly moving to write, beautiful and horrifying in equal measure.

Speaking of trans masc cyborgs, you should all go read Franklyn S. Newton’s Synthetic Sea.

Another story, ‘In Wait of Obsolescence’, takes a different route. Environmental disasters mean everyone is kept inside capsules 24/7 that see to all their needs. No one sees one another anymore, all communication is done through screens, the body has become a burden, and things would probably be easier if we were all digitised. Functionally, we’ve become transhuman. So, what does it mean to nurture the first flourish of one’s transness in this kind of physical isolation, to explore your gender presentation for no one else other than yourself?

How did you choose which stories to open and close the collection, and is there any thematic importance to the order, or can they be read out of sequence? 

I wanted the two longest stories to bookend the collection. More than that, they’re both ultimately hopeful stories that showcase the power of community and depending on one another. They’re about survival.

Although length played a role, the sequencing is based more around emotional ups and downs, balancing the light and the dark, and being mindful of how I’m leaving the reader.

It’s a bit like an album, this is the intended way to read, but not the only. I’m happy for people to read in whatever order they like and, of course, skip over stories where most comfortable.

Finally, do you see cyberpunk as a subgenre being picked up more as a vehicle for telling these kinds of stories in recent years, and do you see its readership expanding among the trans+ and wider queer communities? What do you think the future holds for queer cyberpunk?

I don’t want to beat around the bush. Cyberpunk belongs to Trans+ people. So many people have decried the genre as dead, or passé, but they can’t see beyond the mainstream, where we keep getting derivative stories that can’t do much more than regurgitate what Gibson, Bethke, Stephenson, and Sterling et al were doing in the eighties. But look beneath the surface and there’s a vibrant world of incredible Trans+ writers, artists, game designers, and musicians making innovative, beautiful, frightening, and timely cyberpunk works. And we’ve been here creating and actively influencing cyberpunk for decades.

That’s why I’m writing an entire book about cyberpunk from a Trans+ perspective, covering the early years all the way through the thriving self-pubbed scene.

Trans in the Machine: Chronicling the New Cyberpunk Canon is the first book of its kind to tackle the topic and is due for release in 2027.

What always surprises me is how cis people assume trans art has no audience. How laughable is that? Look at the success of indie books like The Hades Calculus or Magica Riot or films like The People’s Joker to name a few. It’s no different with cyberpunk.

There’s a huge audience here hungry for more. And I genuinely think plenty of cis readers and viewers are bored with mainstream cyberpunk and want something that’s truly subversive and, frankly, more interesting. And who knows, maybe engaging with these kinds of stories is how some might realise they’re trans themselves.

Like This? Try These:

• Author Spotlight: Queer Cyberpunk Author Freddie A. Clarke Date August 14, 2024 In relation to Author Interview
• Author Spotlight: Queer SFF and Vampire Fiction Author H.S. Kallinger Date July 31, 2024 In relation to Author Interview
• A Very Queer March – Itch Bundle Date March 2, 2026 In relation to Event
• Author Spotlight: Queer Sci-Fi Author Astrid Abell Date March 4, 2026 In relation to Author Interview
• Author Spotlight: Queer Spicy Romance Author Ruby Dare Date August 6, 2025 In relation to Author Interview
• Queer Your eReader Event – ON NOW Date January 25, 2025 In relation to Event

The Trans Book Festival is returning to Melbourne Friday 17 April to Sunday 19 April 2026 and I am terrifically excited to be a part of it.

Buy festival passes, as well tickets to all other TBF 2026 events, at transbookfestival.org

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The Trans Book Festival's program is out! You can find me on the Writing the Neuroqueer Experience panel and the evening story event The Book that Made Me Trans, which are both on the Saturday.

Check out the program here: https://www.transbookfestival.org/

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The Free People's Village (Sim Kern) – Twenty years ago, Al Gore won the election and declared a War on Climate Change instead of the War on Terror. The United States led the charge on a green transition that transformed the country. That is to say, an eco-capitalist transition which did little to ultimately reduce carbon emissions but did plenty to shift the burden onto the poorest while the rich rake in subsidies. Minority neighbourhoods previously bulldozed as ghettos are now targeted as inefficient and wasteful as its residents lack the capital to invest in the latest technology and cash in for it.

One such neighbourhood is the Eighth Ward of Huston, Texas where Maddie crashes at The Lab, her boyfriend's warehouse venue. There she joins a queer punk bang and falls for the trans guitarist, Red. Yet with her boyfriend as everyone's landlord, she treads on eggshells to keep the rug being pulled from under their feet. When the venue slated for demolition, along with much of the neighbourhood, Maddie throws herself into the grassroots campaign group led by the neighbourhood's Black residents who resent The Lab's gentrifying role in the area.

The book really targets Maddie with a bullseye. While she starts to grow beyond her naivety, her ignorance, cowardice and privilege is very much on display as the movement grows. She is caught between the those with a desire for radical direct action that triggers brutal police crack downs, and a tempered campaign movement that becomes throttled by an influx of white cis male activists who drown out the voices of the original black residents.

Maddie as a character could have landed far flatter if she had been given more sympathy or just deployed as a punchbag. But she does seem to serve as a good character to show the slow radicalisation of someone who struggles to truly appreciate her own privilege before she wallows in her own white guilt. She also provides an outsider pov as the infighting consumes the campaign at it's core, and the hopeless nihilism that embeds at its fringes.

While Sim gives little in the way of happy endings here, that in itself gives a strong message that while it can feel hopeless against constant set backs from the capitalist machine of government, every small act of resistance plants a seed for the next. In part through this, it speaks volumes to the importance of solidarity and community.

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Orlando (Virginia Woolf) – A mythical, quite psychedelically written 'biography' over four centuries as Orlando moves from a boy under Queen Elizabeth, through countries, careers and personas including being nonplussed by her sudden overnight transformation into womanhood while ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Eventually passing through the Victorian era of misogynistic oppression, marriage, publishing her life long work of poetry and reflecting on her many lives in the early 20th century. The world here is just as it is, without explanation asked or given, as people fade away and back again over centuries.

I absolutely adore Woolf's prose and ethereal style which here feels like floating through Orlando's memories as hazily remembered mythologised rumours. This also makes it a difficult read in places if you are not in the space for it. I never connected to it as a kid, but certainly as the book reaches its final chapter, this feels like a work intended for someone who has lived a long life with a hundred lives and the world has passed by faster than they can recall. The eternal becomes fleeting, yet remains its core. Some passages I struggled with which made me want to skim. But then I re-read a few times to absorb it and it feet like letting wine sit on your tongue to mellow out and pick up the flavours. Not unique to Woolf of course but after reading mostly recent fiction lately, it is rarer to have prose take that risk with a reader.

Certainly its aspect on gender is fascinating and certainly stands out to me so much more since by transition. It feels far stronger than the film in that regard (I adore the film, though these are different beasts in many ways) in giving a narration on gender and the transcendence of it. I didn't expect to connect to it as a trans narrative as much as I did, all things considered, and in many ways it bares little resemblance to the trans narratives we see so often today. It is quiet, considered, self assured and reflective. Not to mention hilarious in places; Orlando herself is someone I could laugh with as deeply as debate with. There if feels like a strong element of Woolf punching through the pages with her offhand jokes on sexism and homophobia.

Small warning that there are some dated terms and attitudes concerning race, including on the first page and Woolf did hold racist and antisemitic views. Just to be clear for anyone who only knows her as a queer writer and hasn't read into her much before.

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The Sapling Cage (Margaret Killjoy) – A plague is killing the trees of Cekon. Blaming witches for the blight, a duchess moves her knights to take control of the kingdom and eradicate the last order of witches. So, bad time sign up to be a witch. But Lorel is a closeted trans girl who dreams not of joining one of the orders of knights but being a part of the sisterhood of witches. They gender segregated of course because cis people be weird about career paths. So when Lorel's friend wants to get out of her commitment to the witches and join the knights instead, Lorel switches places with her.

I enjoyed Lorel and her very emotional journey with members of her coven. It felt very YA vibes in some areas, almost scoobydoo in others, but not excessively so. It's an interesting foundation the book establishes for the world & magic, and Lorel's future. Though in that it is clear this is an intro for a book series and as such feels a little weak on its own. The pacing certainly feels rushed and could have benefited from slowing down and sitting with the characters and world a little longer. As it happens, we jump through locations and events at breakneck speed which I think does it a disservice but would likely aid binge reading it as part of a longer series.

What I did find to be a great strength is Lorel's own internal conflict over her identity and how others perceive her. Notably over whether her desire to change her body is for herself, or for the benefit of those around her. I can imagine a trans person, especially kid, who has just come out would find some of the exchanges in this book to be very comforting and prompt some valuable self reflection.

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