Scott Baker (writer)

Scott Baker (born 1947 in Chicago) is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer. (Though his middle initial is M., he should not be confused with the horror writer who publishes under the name Scott M. Baker.) Baker grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, once a stop on the Underground Railroad, but more recently a bastion of evangelical fundamentalism and political conservativism, resistance to which has been one of the dominant influences on his life and writing. After graduating from New College in Florida, co-owning a leather shop in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and then dropping out of the doctoral program at the UC Irvine, he spent a number of years as a hippy, camping near Tassajarra Zen Center in the Los Padres National Forest and passing much of the rest of his time in various bars. Forced to the realization that he was not having enough fun as a would-be hedonist to justify the lifestyle, he decided to become a full-time writer. On the way there he became what may be the only person to hold a Masters of Arts degree in Speculative Fiction (Goddard College). After 20 years in Paris, where he worked as a publisher's reader for several French publishers and, less artistically, as a financial translator for French brokerage houses, he now lives in Pacific Grove, California. His first novel, Symbiote's Crown (l'Idiot-roi) received the French "Prix Apollo" award. This novel was science fiction. He won a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1985 for Still Life with Scorpion, and has been nominated for the award three other times. Baker was co-author of the screenplay for the French film LITAN, which won the "Prix de la Critique" (Critic's Prize) at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival in 1982, and has worked on a number of other French films. He wrote some of the websites for WHO KILLED EVAN CHANG?, the web tie-in for Steven Spielberg’s film, AI (Warner Brothers, 2001). He has been a judge for the World Fantasy Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. Now in semi-retirement, he devotes most of his time to playing tennis, at which he is tenacious but not particularly gifted.