R. Scott Bakker

Richard Scott Bakker (born February 2, 1967) is a Canadian fantasy author and frequent lecturer in the South Western Ontario university community.

He grew up on a tobacco farm in the Simcoe area.

Bakker was born on February 2, 1967, in Simcoe, Ontario.

R. Scott Bakker's work is dominated by a sprawling series informally known as The Second Apocalypse which he began developing while in college in the 1980s.

The series was originally planned as a trilogy with the first two books entitled The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor.

The third book has been referred to as The Book That Shall Not Be Named by Bakker, since the title of this book is considered to be a spoiler for the preceding volumes.

It is described by a defunct Amazon.ca link as a "novel told from the perspective of a suicidal English professor, recalling his experiences as a seventeen-year-old working on a Southwestern Ontario tobacco farm in the summer of 1984. Part essay, part narrative, part present, part history, Light, Time, and Gravity is a kind of Notes from the Canadian Underground, a portrait of our culture’s abject failure to create a genuine Canadian identity, as well as a stinging indictment of Canada’s literary and intellectual elites."

Two other unreleased works of fiction in progress include the SF novellas Semantica and The Lollipop Factory. The former has been referenced by Bakker a number of times on his blog and is described by fans as a "rumoured title set in a world where nootropic and neurocosmetic techniques have created a class division between those with enhancements and those without, where superhuman Tweakers rebel and are hunted like animals by an oppressive government."

In 1986 he attended the University of Western Ontario to pursue a degree in literature and later an MA in theory and criticism.

Since the late 1990s, he has been attempting to elucidate theories of media bubbles and the intellectual alienation of the working class.

After all but dissertation in a PhD in philosophy at Vanderbilt University he returned to London, Ontario, where he now lives with his wife and daughter.

He spends his time writing split between his fiction and his ongoing philosophic inquiry.

When Bakker began writing the series in the early 2000s, however, he found it necessary to split each of the three novels into its own sub-series to incorporate all of the characters, themes and ideas he wished to explore.

Bakker originally conceived of seven books: a trilogy and two duologies.

This later shifted to two trilogies and one duology, with the acknowledgment that the third series may also expand to a trilogy.

The Prince of Nothing trilogy was published between 2003 and 2006.

It depicts the story of the Holy War launched by the Inrithi kingdoms against the heathen Fanim of the south to recover the holy city of Shimeh for the faithful.

During the war, a man named Anasûrimbor Kellhus emerges from obscurity to become an exceptionally powerful and influential figure, and it is discovered that the Consult, an ancient alliance of forces united in their worship of the legendary No-God, a nihilistic force of destruction, are manipulating events to pave the way for the No-God's return to the mortal world, a Second Apocalypse to succeed the First.

The sequel series, the Aspect-Emperor quartet, picks up the story twenty years later with Kellhus leading the united Zaudunyani kingdoms in directly seeking out and confronting the Consult.

2003-06 and Bakker experienced his initial rise in popularity, he participated frequently with fans at the now read-only Three-Seas forum.

During this time Bakker consistently began to formulate and popularize what would eventually become the foundation for his Blind Brain Theory and Heuristic Neglect Theory then focusing on how studies of human cognitive biases generally and eventually on their impact on academic Philosophy and the greater humanities.

This book is called Neuropath and was published in 2008.

Shortly before The Aspect-Emperor 's second book, The White-Luck Warrior, was published, Bakker released a second novel outside of his main fantasy series.

Titled Disciple of the Dog, it features the private investigator, Disciple Manning, who suffers from a condition reminiscent of hyperthymesia.

The story revolves around Disciple's recounting of a case involving a missing girl, a cult, and the small-town drama of Ruddick.

In 2008, Bakker published Neuropath, a near future SF psychothriller which thematically continued Bakker's elucidation of human cognitive biases and their implications regarding human meaning, purpose, and morality, whatever form they may take.

While the narrative events of the book make for a compelling thought experiment, Bakker included as an Author Afterword a short essay regarding the blending of factual and fictive premises therein and the eventual advent of the narrative's villain in our own world.

The essay marks Bakker first formal mention of his Blind Brain Hypothesis, beyond its use in the narrative proper.

Narrative aside, in the Author Afterword Bakker sources two real world examples concerning illusory consciousness, the inner human experience of temporality and the imperceptible limits of field of vision.

In the essay, as in the book via the character Thomas, Bakker argues that the human sense of the "Now," this very moment, might be symptomatic of perceptual thresholds akin to the human inability to perceive beyond the field of vision, certain colours outside within that field, or the perceptual blind spot caused by the lack of receptors in a portion of the back of the eye.

The first novel in this new series, The Judging Eye, was published in January 2009 and the fourth, The Unholy Consult, was published in July 2017.

While working on the Prince of Nothing series, Bakker was prompted by a crux of events to write a thriller dealing with the cognitive sciences.

He produced a near future science fiction novel involving a serial killer whose knowledge allows them to influence and control the human brain.

It was published in November 2010.

Bakker has planned a number of follow up novels to Disciple of the Dog, including The Enlightened Dead, but due to the first novel's poor reception and very few reviews the sequels have not been pursued.

Bakker also has a number of unreleased works in progress, aside his fantasy opus, most notably Light, Time, and Gravity as well as an eventual anthology of short stories, Atrocity Tales, set within The Second Apocalypse fantasy narrative.

A draft of Light, Time, and Gravity was released serially on Bakker's blog, Three Pound Brain, but has since been removed.

The latter, The Lollipop Factory, has only been mentioned once by Bakker in a Reddit r/Fantasy AMA in 2017.

Aside that it is a "short SF novel," nothing is yet known about this title.

As The Prince of Nothing trilogy was being published circa.