Linn Prentis Literary

Kage Baker was born on June 10, 1952, to George and Katherine Baker, a postman and a fine arts painter, in Hollywood. She grew up in the Hollywood Hills, amid glamorous houses, ruins, and the ruins of glamorous houses. Her aunt and uncle, Anne Jeffreys and Robert Sterling, played the cosmopolitan ghosts on television’s Topper, endowing the young Kage with a permanent and uniquely  flexible view of  time, reality and immortality.

This view was further exacerbated by a classical education at the hands of nuns, and a childhood and adolescence spent trying to improve the world by writing about other, better, more interesting ones. She joined the Living History Centre, the producers of the first and original Renaissance Faire, in the 1970’s, and spent the next 30-odd years in various other virtual centuries. She was a meticulous researcher and performer, writing plays, teaching period history and language, and enacting a variety of strong women from the last half-millenium of history.

During this time, her vision of the underpinnings of history crystallized in the concept of Dr. Zeus, Inc. – an all-powerful cabal responsible for a secret history of the human race. This was the source of her acclaimed Company series (In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote et al) when she began to publish science fiction and fantasy. This series ultimately ran to 8 volumes and dozens of short stories and novellas, spanning human history, two planets, and at least 3 variations on the human race. She won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2004 for Empress of Mars, and was nominated several times for both Hugos and Nebulas.

She also wrote copious fantasy, most outstandingly the novels Anvil of the World and The House of the Stag (nominated for a World Fantasy Best Novel Award in 2009). She contributed stories to numerous anthologies of fantasy and science fiction, including tribute collections for Robert Silverberg and Jack Vance, and published extensively in the developing steampunk genre. Her pirate novellas (Maid on the Shore, Or Else My Lady Keeps The Key et al) were more straight history, but with a healthy dose of mystery and fantasy. She also wrote a children’s book, The Hotel Under the Sand, in the classical traditions of Nesbitt, Eager and Graham.

Her most recent novels will be Not Less Than Gods, a Company/steampunk novel; and The Bird of the River, set in the universe of Anvil of the World. They will be published by Tor, posthumously, as Kage Baker died on January 20, 2010, after a brief and heroic battle with cancer.

She grew up in Hollywood, and lived her entire life in the numerous environments of California. She died in Pismo Beach, her home for the last 15 years, from whence she departed for the Uttermost West. She is assumed to be sailing over the horizon now, dining at the Captain’s table, drinking  the kinds of cocktails that feature rum and fruit spears, and slowing dancing on the aft deck with God

Patricia Briggs grew up in the Wilds . . . .of an old mining town in southwestern Montana where she learned to ride horses.  She listened to storytellers spin yarns of the dwarves that lived in the old mines and the ghosts of miners trapped in the bowels of the earth. After fifteen years of writing she became a sudden, instant, overnight bestseller when Iron Kissed (Mercedes Thompson #3) hit #1 on the New York Times.  She is the author of the bestselling  Mercedes Thompson and  the Alpha and Omega series as well as a number of fantasy novels.  She lives in eastern Washington with her family and their pets in a house that looks like someone crossed a zoo with a library.  The horses have to stay outside.