Malorie Blackman

Six of her ten planets sit in Aquarius, inside eighteen degrees of each other: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Eight of the ten are in fixed signs, with one cardinal and one mutable, and air takes six with a single planet each in earth and water. The record calls Blackman the British author of Noughts and Crosses and a Children's Laureate, who worked as a computer programmer first, and says she was born in London.

Six planets in one sign is worth spelling out, because of which six they are. Identity, speech, taste, drive, scale and limit are all in Aquarius, the sign built on not being told. There is no part of this chart's working machinery left over in another sign to argue with that, and eight fixed planets mean none of it changes position easily. Whatever this person was going to be, the chart says it in one voice, which is a rarer thing than a long list of aspects and more useful than most of them. What it does not say is which trade: the record gives a novelist, a laureate and a job writing software, and six planets in one sign would read the same way for any of the three.

The Sun sits conjunct Jupiter at a fifth of a degree, which is confidence as a character trait rather than as an achievement: generosity, optimism and good fortune, with the warning that nothing in it teaches restraint, so the scale of a thing tends to run ahead of its substance. Mars sits conjunct Saturn at under nine tenths of a degree, controlled force: discipline, stamina, cold effectiveness, and somebody who works long past the point where other people stop. For a novelist the record says came to books after a job writing software, discipline and stamina are the pairing that carries a change of trade, and the two contacts together describe somebody both expansive and very hard to stop.

Mercury sits in hard contact with Neptune at under three quarters of a degree, thinking that gets misty: being misunderstood or misunderstanding, and a tendency to believe the version of events that feels best. In a writer, being misunderstood and preferring the better version are both occupational rather than personal, and the record gives nothing to test either against. The Moon sits in mild friction with Venus at nine tenths of a degree and its sign is certain at eight degrees of Aries, where a feeling arrives first and gets examined afterwards. Mercury, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. Jupiter came back to its Aquarius birth degree on 13 March 2021, at fifty nine, and four laps precede it. That return landed a fifth of a degree from her own Sun, back inside the group of six.