People of the Rock by Sophia Kelly
Sophia Kelly, Author
Sophia Kelly is a queer writer, songwriter, teacher, and web developer living in a restored 1910 craftsman house in Vancouver, where she shares space—and occasional couch disputes—with a large tomcat. Her work draws from a deep mix of experience: decades of ecological activism, a background in physics, and thirty years of practicing and teaching Wiccan energy magic. She’s the lead singer of the dyke country band Bushy Park and co-founded a solar panel workers’ co-op that’s been operating since 2004. Sophia’s stories explore queer relationships, ecological futures, and metaphysical play, grounded in a life full of messy gardens, music, teaching, and an impressive number of exes who still show up to her birthday parties.
Sophia is one of those rare people who live with full presence in every part of their life. She doesn’t just write about magic, queerness, and sustainability, she’s built a life around those things, layering music, activism, love, learning, and ritual into something that feels both grounded and imaginative. Life is not a single lane for Sophia! Instead, she reads like a constellation, full of intersections where art, community, ecology, and personal history keep overlapping and evolving.
Sophia’s new book, People of the Rock, is as layered and genre-bending as she is. Set in a climate-changed near future where parts of Vancouver have vanished into the ocean, the story follows two queer women entangled across time by a mysterious act of magic and a bit of quantum weirdness. It’s a time-travel romance with high stakes, ecological undertones, and a surprising number of goats. Sophia blends speculative science, pagan sensibility, and queer longing into a story that’s both hopeful and deeply human.
You can find her book on her website:
SophiaKelly.ca
About People of the Rock
From the website
In this hopeful queer time-travelling love story, Lucy is destined to save the whole world – okay, Vancouver – from the apocalypse. But does she really have to leave the love of her life to do it? And what’s with all the goats?
Lucy’s ex-girlfriend is missing, her heart is broken, and her shoes are way too slippery when she hits her head and wakes up 500 years in the future. The future, if that’s what it is, is perfect. Vancouver is an eco-paradise, complete with renewable energy, a gift economy, and a smart, hot historian with a big secret. Lucy’s ex is not so lucky.
However, back in the present, her gay best friend is about to be arrested for her murder, and the ancestors of people she now loves will never be born. Will Lucy stay with her true love in paradise or lose everything to save them all?
If you’ve ever worried about how we could possibly thrive after everything the world is throwing at us from pandemics to climate change, this is for you. Sprinkled with nerdy nuggets of seismology, quantum entanglement, and temporal uncertainty for extra seasoning. But goats eat everything, right?