Stephen Baker Books

I set Donkey Show in an El Paso newsroom a few years after this scene. The computers you see are really just “dumb” terminals attached to a single server. I’m the only one who appears to be working. Back then I was still taking notes by hand. One of the key motivations for the journalists…

“Adventure keeps readers enthralled to the very last page” The review site Feathered Quill features a nice write-up. ….Readers will enjoy this gripping story that shows how much influence newspaper articles, politics, and corruption can have on people and their actions. The chapters are short, fast-paced, and addictive. Donkey Show is full of enough action…

How to operate a cognitive implant This is an excerpt from Dark Site. In the scene, Alissa, a 16-year-old from Washington DC, has just gotten a cognitive implant in her brain. It’s a powerful networked computer, though only the size of a fly’s wing. But she needs help learning how to operate it… A therapist came…

My new novel, Donkey Show, is out in trade paperback. The digital version will come next month, with the official launch. The idea for the novel came back in the ’80s. I was working as a general assignment reporter at the (now defunct) El Paso Herald-Post when a freelance photographer returned from a harrowing experience across the border, in…

The portrait above, Saint Dominic of Silos Enshrined as a Bishop, was painted by a Spaniard named Bertolome Bermejo in the 1470s. It was just two decades before Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and the Christian victory in Granada, the Moors’ last foothold in the Iberian Peninsula.  My…

Alissa’s Story The year is 2043. It’s as close to today as we are to 1993. Pods roam the streets of Washington, and black drones circulate above. Sometimes they swoop down, wrap their metallic arms around their targets, and carry people away, high above the Virginia exurbs. The drones slowly shrink into dots, eventually disappearing into…

Forty years ago, I was a student in Spain. It was the year Francisco Franco died. I didn’t know that I was going to be journalist, but I was interested in history, and especially fascism, which seemed at the time to be transitioning from current events to the realm of history. Hitler and Mussolini had provided…