Kage Baker

I promise I will write up this year’s Robert E. Howard Days, but it will be later in the week. Tonight, I want to pay tribute to one of my favorite writers, a lady who is no longer with us and whose work should be remembered.

I’m talking about Kage Baker (1952-2010), who was born today, June 10. I had the pleasureof meeting her at Armadillcon 25, but I had been reading her work for several years prior to that.

And no, that’s not a typo, nor is this a post about another Carolynn Catherine O’Shea. Kage was a combination of the names Kate and Genevieve, which were her middle names

Kage broke into the science fiction and fantasy scene in the late nineties and early two thousands with a series of short stories and novellas, most of them published in Asimov’s.

These stories concerned an ensemble group of operatives of an organization referred to as simply The Company. The series ran to seven novels and three collections of short fiction. The operatives of the Company are immortal time traveling cyborgs.

It doesn’t get much better than  that.

Most of the central characters are children who don’t have families. They are young enough that they can sruvive the process that makes them immortal cyborgs.  They operate in the “shadows of history”, meaning they don’t/can’t change recorded history but they can do thing that aren’t recorded. Much of the assignments they are given involve hiding things such as writings, paintings, and other artifacts that have disappeared from the historical record and placing them where they can be “found” in the future.

The series grows darker as it goes on. The operatives discover that the Company isn’t necessarily composed of good guys. The stories shift their focus from finding missing artifacts to trying to figure out how to avoid a coming catastrophe.

There is an ensemble cast to the series, with some characters appearing in solo adventures. At other times, they can appear in various combinations in the different novels and longer stories, such as novellas and novelettes.

Unfotunately, I thought the final book was where things fizzled out. There is some catastrophe coming around the year 23-something. Or something. There is no known communication from beyond that year by the Company to any operative. I was expecting a dazzling reading experience, but the ending was fairly predictable.

Still, I found the Company series to be one of the more original and refreshing series to come along in a long time. I had a great time reading them and shelled out the cash when Baker became enough of a bestseller to have her books published in hardcover before mass market paperback. I highly recommend them.

There were several spinoff series to the Company after the main one wrapped up, one set on Mars, the toher set in a brothel in the 1800s..

Kage also wrote fantasy and nonseries stories. The most notable of these was the Anvil of the World series.

Baker was suffering from uterine cancer, which had spread to her brain. She was writing a series of reviews of silent movies for Tor  dot com when she died. Her sister edited the columns. They were published under the title Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Train Wrecks of the Silent Screen. It’s worth reading.

Everything she wrote was a fun read. Fortunately, she hasn’t been forgotten. Subterranean Press published a collection of her Mars stories earlier this year. I’m looking forward to caraving out the time to read it.

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