The red dragon flew over Kamber Abbot's birthplace, but really, who wants to grow up in Cardiff? Bad enough that he should have a Welsh name (there are ones less pronounceable but, still: 'Kamber'?) without having to grow up in Wales. His father, Elis, took a job in Washington D.C. working in the Welsh trade delegation, but while his heritage was enshrined at home, Kamber (but please, call him Kam) was placed in American public school when he became old enough to attend. Like most first generation immigrants too young to remember his country of origin, Kamber grew to view Wales as more an idea than a place, one visited as if on a pilgrimage, a 'home' in concept, Platonic and thus effectively unreachable.
As such, legend became Kam's primary pre-occuption, the tales of a Wales that never was, but told the tale of how she wished to be, a mythological past of great kings and mighty heros. There is a special appeal to the myths of a colonized people, a conversion into resistance, a diamond-making pressure that keeps them alive, keeps them free from being locked behind glass, canonized. Kam loved the idea of the living legend, so it was no surprise that he found himself gravitating towards fantasy and, in time, science fiction (the sections in the book store were just so close together!). From grade school onwards, he was taking legends and retelling them, beginning epic projects, trying to retell legends and myths in his own voice.
The trouble was, Kam, for all his ambitions, couldn't finished a damn thing. Ideas he had aplenty, notions and dreams, but execution proved almost impossible for him. He had a literary mind, was a voracious reader and a thoughtful commentator, but every project he began floundered due to a mix of hard-core writer's block and a gnawing self doubt. His friends in college, many of them writers themselves, encouraged him to try harder, to write more, to keep on going, but all the support in the world seemed incapable of getting him to finish something. With a smile that hid his deep disappointment, he resigned himself to facilitate that which he himself could not do.
He went into literary agency. An easy enough thing with the connections he had formed during his years of authorial ambition. Finding and realizing the dreams of aspiring sci-fi and fantasy writers, reading book after book (some good, some hilariously bad)… it's almost enough to make him forget his own previous, self-defeated aspirations. Almost. And sometimes it is enough, though notably only when he finds a talent he is so excited about he can lose himself in its promotion.
Tragedy can breed triumph at times, and while the Bomb ravaged one of the world's greatest cities, the revelation of actual beings with mythical abilities was a personal and professional coup for Kam. He had been in LA, making another fruitless attempt to negotiate a movie deal for one of his more successful (but not successful enough) authors, and thanks to this pointless exercise, his life was spared, and he returned to find interest in tales of the superhuman being both augmented and highly charged. Moreover, the revelation that the heroics of the past might, in fact be fact, Evolved in ages before, has erased any shame Kam might have felt about the 'low brow' quality of his chosen genres. Unapologetic and unwavering in his support of sci-fi and fantasy's validity, he feels that this is their time, this is their cultural moment, and it is his job to find the voices of a new era.
His crown jewel, of course, is Savannah Burton. Referred to him by a fellow agent who thought Abbot might be able to talk her into taking a less political edge, he instead encouraged this aggressive take and marketed it hard as 'controversial'. Not a cynical strategy. Kam truly believes that the best sci-fi says something important about our world, and he believes Ms. Burton is one of those best equipped to do it.
