Thomas Kent Miller

Thomas Kent Miller (born 1945) is an American author, mainly as a novelist and essayist, though he's had two nonfiction books published as well. He lives in southern California and is retired and continues to write voluminously. His career for 35 years was in publishing and publications editing and production.
Background
Miller's strengths have always been writing and editing, and he was fortunate to work for some notable organizations, including GRiD Systems, the Silicon Valley start-up that invented the laptop computer—though it was originally designed to fit comfortably into a briefcase for the sake of business portability, the compact unit and flip screen concepts were all in place, waiting to shrink—and NASA in the 1980s and 1990s, then later the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) to become editor-in-chief of the company's first international general GIS magazine, ArcNews, a position he held for twenty years, all the while writing novels and contributing essays to United Kingdom literary journals. He has written books for Wildside Press, also for Harper & Row, San Francisco, now HarperCollins, and Borgo Press.
Fiction
In 2005, Thomas Kent Miller's The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life (Wildside Press) became the first prose (as opposed to a comic novel) Allan Quatermain adventure pastiche novel and thus became the first Allan Quatermain adventure to be published since 1927, the year of the posthumous publication of H. Rider Haggard's Allan and the Ice Gods, while at the same time being a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Subsequently, in 2013, he wrote a sequel. In all, he has written three Sherlock Holmes pastiche epistolary novels that incorporate elements of H. Rider Haggard published by Rosemill House, Borgo Press, and Wildside Press. He has also had short fiction published by Airship27 and Wildside Press.
Literary Essays
He has contributed respected essays, mainly shedding light on the works of Victorian and Edwardian authors of the fantastic, to The Weird Tales Collector, and to the United Kingdom journals Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen, Ghosts and Scholars M.R. James Newsletter, The H. Rider Haggard Journal, and Wormwood,.
== "Baby James" ==
The Miller's first son, Nicholas, was born February 15, 1985, but within hours the infant became ill with a virulent virus and eventually spent six weeks in the Stanford Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where the doctors and nurses fought for his life and succeeded in presiding over what the lead doctor called "another friggin' miracle". After a quiet year at home in the San Francisco area, in April 1986 he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure (due to the effects of the virus), and Miller and his wife were told that there was nothing to be done, except possibly a heart transplant. At the time only two newborns had had this brand new controversial pediatric surgery. Events moved quickly and on April 26, 1986, Nicholas received a new heart (from an anonymous donor). He was the first toddler to ever be the recipient of a new heart, and the surgery became international news; to maintain anonymity for Nicholas and his parents, "Baby James" was the name given to the press (like Baby Fae and Baby Moses before him). However four months later, Nicholas' body rejected the new heart, and he died on August 31, 1986. Afterwards, the Millers together wrote of their roller-coaster experiences with their son, and the resultant book, titled Baby James: A Legacy of Love and Family Courage, was published by Harper and Row, San Francisco (now HarperCollins) in 1988.
Mars in the Movies: A History
Miller grew up reading science fiction novels and watching science fiction films. His lifelong fascination in Mars movies culminated in 2016 with the publication of the book Mars in the Movies: A History, which is the first cinematic reference book focused entirely on Mars movies, 95 films from 1910 to 2016, published by McFarland & Company.
Books
* Mars in the Movies: A History (2016)
* Sherlock Holmes in the Fullness of Time (2016)
* Allan Quatermain at the Dawn of Time (2013)
* The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life (2005)
* Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World (1987)
* Baby James: A Legacy of Love and Family Courage (with Jayne Miller) (1988)

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