Jilly Paddock Books in Order

Jilly Paddock was born in London and grew up in South London, close to a park famous for its dinosaurs. It is a neat origin story for a science fiction and fantasy writer, and it also feels true to the books. Her fiction is full of strange creatures, uneasy futures, and moments when the familiar world suddenly tilts into something uncanny.

Before writing took center stage, she worked in science. She spent some time in medical research, then worked as a biomedical scientist in NHS microbiology labs. That background matters. Her stories often have a grounded, practical feel, even when they are dealing with telepathy, alien life, or technology that looks a lot like magic.

Writing had been part of her life for a long time, but early retirement gave her the time to publish more of it. In 2012 she brought out three books, The Dragon, Fly, and other flights of fancy, No Earthly Shore, and To Die A Stranger. That is a strong introduction to what she does: short speculative fiction, first contact science fiction, and a larger future thriller built around spies, computers, and dangerous systems of control.

She likes to bend genres.

Readers who start with No Earthly Shore get one side of her work straight away. It is a first contact story, but also a humane one, built around colonists, marine biology, and the question of whether a truly alien life form can be understood before it is exploited. A later book like Warbird pushes further into space opera, carrying that same curiosity about alien encounter and the risks of reaching beyond known space.

And she keeps widening the map.

A big part of her fiction sits in a connected future history. To Die A Stranger, With Amber Tears, Starchild, and The Beauty of Our Weapons follow Anna-Marie Delany and her computer partner, Zenni, through espionage, flight, corporate power, and psionic abilities that make every alliance feel unstable. Then there are The Spook and the Spirit in the Stone and Dead Men Rise Up Never, which follow Detective Inspector Afton Lamont and Jerome through mysteries that start as police work and drift into something darker and stranger. Across all of it, Paddock returns to a few favorite threads: first contact, altered humanity, compromised institutions, and old powers that may be supernatural, or may simply be science no one fully understands yet.

Her off-page interests seem to feed the work too. She has spoken about loving poetry, especially Yeats and Walter de la Mare, as well as folk music, tarot decks, studio glass, and crafts like cross stitch and beading. You can feel some of that in the fiction. There is often a taste for atmosphere, a fondness for the eerie, and a sense that beauty and menace can share the same room.

She now lives on the edge of the Fens in the UK, in a house stuffed with books and CDs. With her partner, she runs Cathaven Press and helps produce Occult Detective Magazine. It sounds like the kind of life her stories point toward, bookish, curious, a little gothic, and still open to the next strange idea.