Do the Stars Predict You’ll Be the Next Big Sci-Fi Author?
My initial reasons for studying my birth chart were selfish. I wanted to know if it implied I should do what I want to do, which is to write novels. Since then, I’ve found astrology to be very effective at “issuing a permission slip” that helps us do what we were born to.
In fact, in a birth chart reading, most people don’t hear things they didn’t already know —they just unearth the inner truth that was buried under loads of societal expectations. That is why some astrologers call the study of the stars an “act of remembering.”
My light bulb went off for one placement on my own chart, Uranus in the 12th House, that speaks not to my overall vocation, but to the genre of my current work: speculative science fiction.
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The 12th House represents transcendence, the subconscious, dreams, secrets, and mental health. As I've written previously, Uranus is freedom, individuality, innovation, breakthroughs, revelation, and truth.
With Uranus in the 12th House, a person receives ideas seemingly out of nowhere, sometimes in bursts, and not always with a way to turn them into tangible reality. It’s like Michelangelo saying the statue was already inside the block of stone and he just had to find it. The 12th House also represents the collective unconscious, so with Uranus’ ability to flip the light switch, one very well may be pulling ideas out of the shared mind of humanity.
If I could set up a corner stand and sell ideas like lemonade, I would do it. My ideas haven’t always “worked” as startups or even short stories, but they keep coming at me.
In Visionary Activist Astrology, Caroline Casey says,
The 12th House is our culture’s unconscious, what our culture has forgotten, or suppressed, or exiled. Uranus in the 12th House has a very interesting task to bring into the world some art form of intuition and liberation … and to find a way to bring it back up.
Very often people with Uranus in the 12th House have startling, prophetic dreams that are not just for themselves.
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This brought a new lens to how I see my current work (one of my short stories is, literally, based on a dream I had), and also reminded me of how the fiction of Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley, and Ursula Le Guin is called prophetic (whether that’s their intent is a different question—it still holds that their art serves society in that way).
I did a Google Search to look up their birth charts.
Ursula Le Guin’s 12th House Uranus
With Uranus in Aries, Ursula Le Guin would innovate as a pioneer, a warrior, or a champion. Le Guin's Earthsea series is a coming-of-age story about a reckless wizard.
Margaret Atwood’s 12th House Uranus
With Uranus in Taurus, Margaret Atwood would focus her revelations on value, nature, climate, or food. In Oryx and Crake, she warns us about extreme climate.
Octavia Butler’s 12th House Uranus
With Uranus in Gemini, Octavia Butler would be inspired through wit, exploration, messages, and social themes. In Parable of the Sower, Butler's heroine is a writer/prophet herself.
While my initial search came back 3/3, some sci-fi authors I investigated do not have Uranus in the 12th House. N. K. Jemisin has it in the 5th House and Stephen King has Uranus in the 11th House. Aldous Huxley’s publicly posted birth chart does not contain the time of birth so houses cannot be calculated.
Keep in mind, these publicly available charts are not guaranteed to be accurate.
There are only 12 houses, and house placement is based on time of day, so the chance of someone having Uranus in their 12th House is approximately 8.3%. Uranus in the 12th certainly exists for people who don’t write sci-fi, yet contribute work inside 12th House themes, such as my friend who is working on a mental health startup.
I had to browse through a number of non-author celebrities to find someone who shares this placement and eventually saw that Jennifer Aniston has Uranus in the 12th House—I can’t even think of a sci-fi film she’s starred in. Yet, only she could answer if writing sci-fi was her missed calling!
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