A Hugo award-nominated book by Hugo Award-winning author Ronnie Lee Ellis. First released and marketed as a work of nonfiction under its original title, Slave Trader: An Unauthorized Biography of Mary Medea, the book tanked big time, ignored by the media and Miz Ellis’s fans alike. According to sources close to the Bajar family, Miz Ellis attributed the failure to the fact that, after Mary Medea’s death, the galactic citizenry lost interest in the descendants of revolutionary hera Molly Medea. A second attempt to sell the book as a nonfiction title (some cycles later and with several added chapters) under the name, Cult Leader: An Unauthorized Biography of Glorianna of Phoebus, achieved similar results. With this publication, Miz Ellis seemed to be trying to attach her work to the unsubstantiated rumor that Mary Medea and Glorianna of Phoebus were one and the same person, as G-of-P had only risen to prominence in the Phoebus System after Medea’s death.

Conspiracy theorist loners aside, the public did not appear ready to jump on this particular bandwagon and rejected the book, en masse. Not to be deterred, Miz Ellis went back to the drawing board and began to turn her book into a work of fiction (though some say this wasn’t a great leap). She changed the names of the characters, added some plot and description, then published The Doll Maker to wide acclaim. The following is a brief synopsis of the plot of The Doll Maker from The Galactic Encyclopedia of Literature and Literature-Equivalents: “Wealthy krystal heiress and pan-galactic busybody Ariadne Josephs forms a company called Baby-Oh-Baby Dolls for the purpose of producing pleasure droids, which are then sent to destroy the children of her rival, ruthless business tycoon Vercingetorix Moses Hannibal Rajab McPhee. Through an overlong series of events, McPhee’s children, the brilliant Lucrezia and her mentally challenged brother Phaleef, turn the tables on Josephs, annihilating the sex droids and taking down the religious cult Ariadne has maintained to mask her various nefarious plots.”