Sandra Bond (she/her) was born Staffordshire, UK. Trained first as librarian, then as lawyer, and discovered the reality of both was a big disappointment; worked as dray driver for a craft brewery in London until Covid mowed down craft breweries like a machine gun; now once again living in Staffordshire, delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy.
My best ideas come while driving; I love long road trips (though sadly US ones are off the menu for the foreseeable future). Discovered science fiction fandom as a teen and have hung around it for over thirty years; in return it gave me the contacts in the community to get a publishing deal. Apart from writing, I am a musician and songwriter (formerly in London indie-punk band The Donutsh), am queer and trans and an activist by both nature and practice, and am currently winning a lifelong battle with mental health and brain-weasels.
Author Links:
Author website: sandra-bond.com
Facebook: @SandraBondAuthor
Mastodon: wandering.shop/@klepsydra
Twitter: has been hurled into the far distance with a feeling of great relief
Goodreads: Sandra_Bond
Indie Story Geek: @Klepsydra
Three Men In Orbit (Amazon UK): Amazon Link
The Psychopath Club (Amazon UK): Amazon Link
The Devil’s Finger (Amazon UK): Amazon Link
Poetry Slum (Amazon UK): Amazon Link
Welcome Sandra, let’s chat about your work, Three Men in Orbit, which is a Sci-Fi comedy based on the characters of Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 classic, Three Men in a Boat. What’s your relationship with Jerome’s book, first of all, and how did this develop into your novel?
I was ten years old, and we were having what was meant to be a quiet period at school reading our library books. I can’t recall why I took Three Men in a Boat out — perhaps I’d already heard about it — but I got into trouble because I kept breaking silence by laughing aloud at it. I couldn’t help myself.
Since then I’ve reread it, and its sequel Three Men on the Bummel, multiple times — every few years, in fact. A few years ago, we found a trend of people taking classic novels which were out of copyright due to age, and seamlessly — in some cases — rewriting them by inserting a fantastic element into them. “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is the trope-namer here, I suppose. Well, Jerome K. Jerome had also been long enough dead to be out of copyright, and I couldn’t see that anyone had tried this twist on him yet, and my publisher was delighted with the idea; so I embarked on writing Three Men in Orbit. It was great fun — as writing is supposed to be, but often isn’t…
What were the main challenges in bringing the Victorian/Edwardian material and characters to life for a modern audience?
Those who have read Three Men in a Boat will know that while it remains very funny, it lacks some qualities we expect in novels written today. For instance, it consists more of a string of amusing events with digressions for anecdotes or historical tales, than of an actual plot as modern readers demand.
More problematic still, it has no female characters to speak of, and even if I thought I could get away with a book lacking women nowadays, I wouldn’t want to. Happily, this gave me the major theme of the book; I was musing on what I could do to introduce some women characters, and the thought struck me that at the time it was set, the women’s suffrage movement was very much in evidence.
Now, I’d taken liberties with science to introduce anti-gravity and space travel and so on to the Edwardian era, and obviously this would affect such issues as transport, colonialism, etc. which took place in our history of that period. But while it might have also altered politics, I couldn’t see that it would *automatically* have changed that aspect of it.
So it all fell into place; I gave Jerome’s three men three women counterparts, who would show up at various points in the book and tangle with them, help get them out of scrapes, and so on. Once I’d worked that out, everything else pretty much flowed along naturally.
How did you set about navigating the dynamics of the titular characters and expanding on the themes – can you tell us about your writing process?
I wanted to write in as close a pastiche of Jerome’s style as I could (and pastiche is a strong point of mine — I worry that I don’t have a distinctive writing voice of my own, which may or may not actually be the case, but I am good at riffing off others who do), while at the same time making the book relevant to modern sensibilities and beliefs.
Introducing women as characters was the first step to that, but I also tried to update Jerome to the current day in other ways. For example, there’s a trans character (though they aren’t referred to as that, since Jerome wouldn’t have known the term) and another character who’s strongly hinted to be asexual.
It was an interesting exercise to incorporate such themes while staying as close as I could to the language which would have been available to Jerome over a century ago.
The three men of the title are essentially well-meaning but accident-prone men of the day. As a reviewer has pointed out, if such a trio went to space in reality, they’d be dead in no time because Space Is Difficult. I knew from the start that I wasn’t aiming for pure scientific accuracy — not only is that difficult, but also I wanted to produce a book that one felt Jerome *could* have written, and for that I called upon the proto-science fiction of the time — especially H. G. Wells — with which Jerome would most likely have been familiar.
Wells’ anti-gravity science is baloney, as Jules Verne famously pointed out, but his reputation seems to thrive despite that. So, when it came to giving the three protagonists character development arcs, it wasn’t hard to have the them respond to the suffrage campaigners with some suspicion but with basic decency, allowing them to learn from the experience and become (if this doesn’t sound too priggish) better people.
Your previous two novels, The Psychopath Club and The Devil’s Finger, also both blend comedy with SFF; what is it for you about the medium of comedy that allows you to tell the Science Fiction and Fantasy narratives in longer form?
I’m a depressive, and have been all my life. It’s always fascinated me that some of the very funniest people ever — Robin Williams, Spike Milligan — have struggled with their mental health. I try to use comedy as a kind of shield, off can bounce which some of the worst things that the world likes to throw at you.
Now in science fiction and fantasy, we often find that whether it’s set in the world we know, or in fictional ones, the same issues that beset us in reality also crop up in the genre — often magnified to an even larger size than they are in our world. Political toxicity, wars, diseases, there are dozens of things that can assail helpless characters in SFF.
Some authors like to create larger than life characters in response to these larger than life issues. I have always struggled with the concept of the hero; I think everyone, in reality, is pretty much just an ordinary human being, and we’re all just making it up as we go along.
So my protagonists tend to be ordinary people, who find themselves beset by extraordinary circumstances, and with the help of (often unsuspected) internal strength and/or external support, come through them in one piece.
Comedy is a big part of that; if you can see the amusing aspect of the mess you’re in, you can draw strength from that, and my characters tend to do just that. It can be an overt theme, as in The Devil’s Finger, or just a part of character building. If you find a humourless character in my fiction, it’s generally a sign that they’re not to be trusted. Humourless people worry me.
You also have a back catalogue of SFF and Horror short stories – do you find yourself working with similar themes across your work, or returning to settings/ideas?
To return to something I’ve already touched upon, I find it hard to believe in heroes. (Just look at the world around you. Do you see any?) I especially decline to participate in the trope of the Chosen One, which a lot of SFF seems fond of. I find it far more congenial, not to mention easier, to create normal people — people you might meet any day of your life, at least if you happened to live in their world.
I suppose that if you write about big heroes, you invite the reader to imagine themself as a big hero too; whereas if you write about regular people, you don’t ask the reader to stretch their imagination so much. They can — hopefully! — identify with them quite easily. And then you can save the imagination-stretching for the events they have to cope with.
What other themes do I return to? Well, I’m a left-wing queer author, and so I tend to write stories with left-wing queer sensibilities. I like to have diverse casts. I don’t treat queer characters as cannon fodder — I find it very disheartening that in 2025 this is still such a trope (“Bury Your Gays”). And I tend to have problems solved by thought and by communication rather than by action or by violence. Oh, I include action and violence, because one must keep one’s writing lively — but much of the time it’s made plain that violence is part of the problem and not part of the solution. I haven’t done much in the way of returning to settings.
I have tried several times to write more fiction set in the Midwestern locale of The Psychopath Club — I call it “The Muldooniverse”, after the fictional town of Muldoon where TPC is set — but I’ve struggled to make it work. I’ll keep trying. I like that setting, and of course, nowadays series books are very much the recommended thing for indie authors.
I am currently working on a fantasy series, which I expect to be 3-4 books long, each one a direct sequel to the previous novel. I haven’t written an outright fantasy world before and it’s stretched my writing muscles, but only in a good way. I’ve enjoyed creating that world, little by little, and I’m going to keep fleshing it out as I go.
I know some authors create their entire world first, before they write a word of the actual story, but I chose to do it this way because then I can’t run into a point where I say “Oh dear, I need something to happen which can’t occur in the world as I’ve created it” and have to take time out to amend the setting. That would be No Fun.
What has been your favourite reader responses to your work so far – either your latest novel, or to your work in general?
The trouble with the publishing scene nowadays is trying to get noticed. Back in the day, it was different; almost everything came from a major trad publishing house, and almost everything got reviewed.
I’ve had some very good reviews, and they’ve gladdened my heart, but I still feel like a voice in the wilderness; I feel that I’m writing good books, which people like who read them, but that most people don’t know that the books or I exist, and that’s the barrier I need to break through, somehow.
My favourite single review so far has been in the magazine “Portable Storage”, whose editor William Breiding devoted a good chunk of space to The Psychopath Club, and showed that he *exactly* saw what I was trying to do with it and why. I was practically punching the air as I read that one.
“A really good read… There are moments of very good and effortless scene building. The chapter describing the The Psychopath Club’s band, Horsehead, and its first gig at the VFW and ensuing chaos is a breathless rush of brilliance. And it’s immediately apparent that The Psychopath Club is Catcher in the Rye done properly.”
— William Breiding, Portable Storage
Every author, I suppose, is trying to communicate with the reader, and worries about whether they are doing so effectively or not. Breiding’s review showed me that, in his case at least, I’d hit my target right on the bullseye. A wonderful, warm feeling that was for me.
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