Clare Bell
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clare Bell (born 1952) is an author in the USA best known for her Ratha series of young adult fantasy novels about prehistoric big cats. These books, also called the Named series, are about intelligent self-aware large cats who have puma, cheetah and lion characteristics, and are based on fossil creatures who are ancestors of the saber-tooth cat.
The first book in the series, Ratha’s Creature appeared in 1983. The flap copy on the paperback re-issue of Clan Ground (the second book in the series which appeared in 1984) states that Bell:
- is a scientist, engineer, and author whose work has taken her to Norway to build electric cars, to Tahiti for research, to Marine World/Africa USA to meet a cheetah and into the depths of prehistory to develop the Ratha series...The author blends science and fantastic projection in her depiction of the Named –- cheetah-like cats with an organized society.
Readers who followed Erin Hunter’s Warriors series about feral cats have gone on to read the Ratha series.
Bell’s love for big cats is also expressed in Tomorrow’s Sphinx (about cheetahs in past and future Egypt) and The Jaguar Princess (a werecat (jaguar) woman in Aztec Mexico). Bell is also fascinated with flight, writing People of the Sky about Pueblo Indians who migrate from Earth to another planet and learn to ride winged aliens. Bell’s short stories have appeared in the Witch World and CatFantastic (cats and magic) anthologies, both edited by science fiction and fantasy writer, Andre Norton.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Clare Bell was born in 1952 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England and moved with her family to the United States in 1957. While growing up in Palo Alto, California, she became fascinated by prehistoric mammals and pored over Charles R. Knight’s paintings in books on paleontology. After attending the University of California, Santa Cruz she used her training in biology and chemistry by working as a hydrological and geological field technician for the US Geological Survey, serving on the USGS research vessel Polaris, based in Redwood City, California. Returning to college under the Women in Engineering Program at the University of California, Davis, she then joined IBM in San Jose, California as an electrical engineer.
Inspired since childhood by Olaf Stapledon’s novel Sirius: A Tale of Love and Discord, about a sheep dog with human-level intelligence, she began writing Ratha’s Creature, the first novel of the Named series. Published in 1983 by Margaret K. McElderry Books. This first novel won the International Reading Association’s Children’s Choice Award and the PEN Los Angeles award for that year. ‘‘Ratha’s Creature’’ was also adapted for television animation and aired as a CBS Storybreak episode in the late 1980s.
Leaving IBM in 1990 to begin a full-time writing career, Bell also became interested in electric vehicles. After converting a VW beetle to electric with a conversion kit, she began building, racing, repairing, designing and racing electric cars. From 1992 to 1999 also became the editor of the Electric Auto Association’s (a nationwide US electric car club) monthly newsletter, Current Events. As part of the Women’s Electric Racing Team, she competed in the Arizona Public Service utility company’s APS Solar and Electric 500 and APS Electrics electric vehicle races, held in Phoenix, Arizona from 1993 to 1997.
She also turned her electric vehicle experience into a profession, working as an electric vehicle engineer for CALSTART and private companies until 2003.
Bell found to her surprise that books written nearly twenty years ago still had fans and had been kept alive on the Internet. When Sharyn November, editor at Viking Children's Books and editorial director of Firebird Books, asked the author to write another Ratha story, Bell was delighted and wrote the new ‘‘Ratha’s Courage’’, which Viking will publish in Fall 2007. The first four Ratha titles will be reissued as Firebird paperbacks in Summer and Fall 2007.
Bell and her husband live in the hills west of Patterson, California, where they have built their own solar, wind and hydroelectric systems.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Series
Ratha (the Named) series:
- Ratha’s Creature (orig. 1983), re-issue 2007, ISBN 978-0-14-240843-8
- Clan Ground (orig. 1984), re-issue 2007, ISBN 978-0-14-240812-4
- Ratha and Thistle-chaser (1990) ISBN 0-689-50462-4
- Ratha’s Challenge (1991)
- Ratha’s Courage (to be released in 2007)
Ancient Tahiti (collaboration with M. Coleman Easton, published under pseudonym Clare Coleman)
Daughter of the Reef (1992) ISBN 0-515-11012-4 Sister of the Sky (1993?) Child of the Dawn (1994?)
[edit] Non-series
Tomorrow’s Sphinx (1986) ISBN 0-689-50402-0 People of the Sky (1989) ISBN 0-312-93131-X The Jaguar Princess
[edit] Short stories
- The Hunting of Lord Etsalian’s Daughter
- The Damcat
- Bomber and the Bismarck
- A Tangled Tahitian Tale
[edit] Television adaptations
CBS Storybreak episode Ratha’s Creature (1985)
