Clare Bell facts for kids

Clare Bell, born in 1952, is a British author living in the United States. She is famous for her exciting fantasy novels, especially the Ratha series. These books are about smart, prehistoric big cats. The cats in her stories are like a mix of pumas, cheetahs, and lions. They are inspired by ancient animals, including the saber-tooth cat.

The first book in the Ratha series, Ratha's Creature, came out in 1983. Clare Bell's love for big cats also shows in other books. Tomorrow's Sphinx is about cheetahs in ancient and future Egypt. The Jaguar Princess tells the story of a jaguar woman in Aztec Mexico.

Clare Bell is also very interested in flying. She wrote People of the Sky about Pueblo Indians. In this story, they travel from Earth to another planet. There, they learn to ride aliens that have wings. Her short stories have appeared in collections like Witch World and CatFantastic. These collections feature cats and magic. They were put together by the famous science fiction and fantasy writer, Andre Norton.

More recently, Clare Bell wrote Ratha's Island. This was a special short story written for Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging service where posts are very short. This allows people to read them on cellphones. Ratha's Island was one of the first stories written this way. It was very popular. It is similar to cellphone novels, which are popular in Japan. The story ran on Twitter from March 14, 2009, to May 9, 2009. It explored the idea of alternative evolution. This means imagining how animals might have evolved differently. In this story, six-legged prehistoric mammals evolved on an isolated island.

Biography

Early Life and Education

Clare Bell was born in 1952 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England. Her family moved to the United States in 1957. She grew up in Palo Alto, California. As a child, she became very interested in prehistoric mammals. She loved looking at Charles R. Knight's paintings in books about paleontology.

She studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She used her training in biology and chemistry to work for the US Geological Survey. She was a field technician, studying water and rocks. She even worked on a research ship. Later, she went back to college at the University of California, Davis. She then became an electrical engineer at IBM in San Jose, California.

Writing Career

Since she was a child, Clare Bell was inspired by Olaf Stapledon's novel Sirius. This book is about a very smart sheep dog. This inspiration led her to start writing Ratha's Creature. This was the first book in her famous Ratha series. It was published in 1983. This first novel won two important awards. It received the International Reading Association's Children's Book Award. It also won the PEN United States Literary Award that year. Ratha's Creature was even made into a cartoon for TV. It aired as a CBS Storybreak episode in the late 1980s.

Clare Bell left IBM in 1990 to become a full-time writer. She found that her books, even those written many years ago, still had many fans. The first four Ratha books were re-released in 2007. A new book, Ratha's Courage, was published in October 2008. In January 2013, a project was started to create a graphic novel e-book of Ratha's Creature.

Electric Cars

After leaving IBM, Bell also became very interested in electric vehicles. She even changed a VW Beetle into an electric car herself. She then started building, racing, and repairing electric cars. From 1992 to 1999, she was the editor of a newsletter called Current Events. This newsletter was for the Electric Auto Association. This is a club for electric car owners in the US.

She also competed in electric vehicle races in Phoenix, Arizona. She was part of the Women's Electric Racing Team. She used her experience with electric vehicles in her job too. She worked as an electric vehicle engineer for different companies until 2003.

Clare Bell and her husband live in the hills west of Patterson, California. They have built their own systems to get power from the sun, wind, and water.

List of Works

Series Novels

• Ratha, or The Books of the Named
  • Ratha's Creature (1983)
  • Clan Ground (1984)
  • Ratha and Thistle-chaser (1990)
  • Ratha's Challenge (1991)
  • Ratha's Courage (Imaginator Press, 2008)
• Ancient Tahiti, by Bell and M. Coleman Easton, under joint pseudonym Clare Coleman
  • Daughter of the Reef (1992)
  • Sister of the Sky (1993)
  • Child of the Dawn (1994)

Other Novels

• Tomorrow's Sphinx (1986)
• People of the Sky (1989)
• The Jaguar Princess (1993)

Short Stories

• "The Hunting of Lord Etsalian's Daughter" in anthology series Tales of the Witch World, edited by Witch World creator Andre Norton
• "The Damcat" in anthology series Catfantastic, edited by Norton and Martin H. Greenberg
• "Bomber and the Bismarck" in the Catfantastic series
• "A Tangled Tahitian Tale" in the Catfantastic series
• "Bonechewer's Legacy" (2009) in speculative fiction anthology Firebirds Soaring, edited by Sharyn November – Ratha series
• "Ratha's Island" (2009), published on Twitter (archived December 2009) – Ratha series

Television Adaptations

• "Ratha's Creature" (1985), an episode of CBS Storybreak