Remembering Kage Baker

1 Reply

Today, as I write this, it is June 10. That makes it the birthday of Kage Baker (1952-2010). She had a short career. Her first story was published in 1997.

It’s been said that some people’s careers are so short because they are so bright. That was certianly the case with Kage Baker. Most of her work is set in a future called the Company future. The main part of the series involved immortal time-traveling cyborgs.

Can it get much better than that? Maybe, but there are many contenders. The series involves cyborgs working in the shadows of history. Things believed lost for years, manuscripts, paintings, artifacts, stuff like that, are suddenly found. Because a cyborg agent hid the item. They can do this because the item has vanished from the historical record. They don’t try to change the past.

The series has amultiple characters that interact throughout novels, movellas, and short stories. There is an overaching storyline. The cyborgs know that something is going to happen several hundred years from our present, but they don’t know what. The finale of the series is sthe big reveal.

She was beginning to write in other series than the Company and in spin-offs in the Company future after she brought the Company series to its conclusion. (I was disappointed with the finale.)

Kage Baker is one of my favorites. I had the pleasure of meeting her at Armadillocon 25 a few years before her death from a brain tumor.

Her work has mostly fallen out of print but should be available in electronic editions and on the secondary market. Kage Baker had a unique voice, and I’ve not read anyone like her before or since. She is one of the writers whose work I tend to buy when I come across even though I have most of her books in the original hardcovers. Reading copies are always welcome.

Remembering Keith Laumer

4 Replies

Today, June 9, is the birthday of Keith Laumer (1925-1993). Laumer was a prolific science fiction writer back in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Laumer is best known for the Retief series about a two-fisted diplomat and the Bolo series about sentient tanks.

He is pretty much out of print these days. That’s a shame, because I think his nonseries work is some of his best, especially at shorter lengths.

One of Laumer’s favorite subgenres was time travel, and he wrote a number of time travel stories. Preeminent among them was Dinosaur Beach.

Laumer also tended to write military sceince fiction, which is a Duh! since he created the Bolos. He was friends with Gordon R. Dickson, and they collaborated on the novel Planet Run.

About twenty or so years ago, Baen reprinted many of Laumer’s works in omnibus editions edited by Eric Flint. Those are worth picking up if you can find them. That shouldn’t be hard. I jsut checked and found out I missed one. Picked it up for just under ten bucks.

June Update

Leave a reply

I’m not sure this blog currently needs an update since there hasn’t been much happening that would be of interest to anyone.

But I need to keep my writing streak up, and a blog post will do that. I’ve written a minimum of one hundred words a day every day so far this year. I’m going to try to keep that up next week at Robert E. Howard Days. I’ll post an update after its over.

The current story I started writing, which is a short story assignment for a mentorship I’m involved in, is going to be put on hold. It’s not going to be a short story. A novella or novel. So that’s not something I want to work on tonight. I’m too tired for that level of focus.

Summer classes have started. I’m teaching both five week terms this summer. Today was the end of the second week of the first term. My students will be having their first emotional experience, I mean their first exam, on Monday.

This weekend will be (more) yard work, plus as much wriitng and reading as I can get in. It won’t be enough, but it will be more than I get in on weekdays.

I have no major plans for travel or much of anything else after Howard Days. there’ll be a short break before fall classes start.

I’m hoping to publish some collections, a couple of novellas, and at least one novel byt the end of the year. I’m trying to learn Vellum for that. The collections will be at least one mystery/crime collection and probably a fantasy. I really need to organize my inventory. I’m not going to set any deadlines since I’ll probably end up missing them. I’ll post announcements here as things come together and I pull the trigger.

What’s up with ya’ll?

Submission Accepted, Submission Withdrawn

9 Replies

Two summers ago, I participated in a series of workshops for an anthology project. There were six anthologies, all with a different genre or theme and a different editor for each. One of them was a mystery anthology. All writers got personal feedback from the editors if their stories weren’t selected.

None of my stories were selected. Not a big surprise, but I got some useful feedback.

Fastforward to January of 2025. Igot off my butt and sent the mystery story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. for those who might not be aware, AHMM has an abyssmal response time. The few stories I had submitted before had a response time of a year. Or longer.

Time marches on, I put the submission out of my mind, the ownership of AHMM changed, (as did the ownership of Ellery Queen, Asimov’s, Analog, and F&SF. I’ve written about that here.) I focused on other projects.

There have been some complaints about the contract terms the new publisher has put into the contracts. I know some writers who no longer submit to any of these magazines because of some of the terms the publisher won’t negotiate on.

Then I got an email recently.

The story had been accepted. Contract attached. Publication date August.

Sixteen month response time.

I read the contract and withdrew the story.

This was the first time I’d seen one of the new contracts, although I had heard plenty about them from a few writer friends.

The word “irrevocable” was used frequently.  I would be signing away all rights, including audio, film, and media. There was no reversion clause.

Sorry, but I’m only interested in licensing first North American and/or English language serial rights. Not anything else. And certainly not in perpetuity.

It was a thrill to get a contract. On the other hand, I have to wonder if I would have gotten the acceptance if the contract terms hand’t changed. Have enough top writers stopped submitting to AHMM that they are buying from second-tier?

I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

As for the story, I don’t recall that much about it. I’ll reread it and decide what I want to do with it.

But that’s what’s been going on with me lately.

State of the Blogger

4 Replies

Finals are over, grades are turned in. Just in time, too. My campus uses Canvas, and they had some major disruptions last week.

I’ve got end of the year paperwork to do for assessments. Syllabi for fall are due by the end of the month. The university has mandated that everyone use Simple Syllabus, which is a pain in the butt. One reason they are requiting it is because the administration can changeour syllabi without our knowledge or consent. (They did last semester.)

Allergies knocked me on my butt the last few days, but I’m almost back to (hwat passes for) normal (for me).

I’m hoping to get some reading, writing, and resting in before summer classes start.

That’s about it for me. I may post more here over the next few weeks or not. I was going to do a birthday post on Gene Wolfe a few days ago. I read one of his short stories. It had been published in Orbit, so i was hoping to kill two birds iwth one stone by making it a combination birthday and unthemed anthology review post. By the time I was able to sit down and write, I was falling asleep.

But I’m not dead and I haven’t killed anyone whose body has been found yet.

I hope things are well with all of you.

Van Vogt Plus Gold

1 Reply

Todayis April 26, the birthday of A. E. Van Vogt (1912-200) and Horace L. Gold (1914-1996).

Alfred Elton Van Vogt was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He was one of the major writers of science fiction in the early forties. His best known work was published in Astounding. His two novels about the weapon makers of Isher are classics of libertarian science fiction.

Slan was a novel about mutants that fandom idnetified with. At conventions, tehy are reported to chant “Fans are Slans!” becuase they felt they were superior to ordinary people, whom they called “mundanes”.

Van Vogt also wrote a great deal of short fiction. He got involved in dianetics  for a while. His reputatoin as a writer never recovered when he caem back to writing. Baen published several omnibus collections of his works and Tachyon Press has a collection of his short stories in print.

Horace L. Gold started out as a writer (see my review of “The Trouble with Water”) who went on to be the first editor of Galaxy magazine from 1950 until 1961. It is in that capacity that he is remembered today. Gold’s run on Galaxy saw the publication of a number of stories by the biggest names in science fiction, stories that went on to be soncisered classics.

One habit Gold had that irked Fred Pohl to no end was his tendency to change the titles of stories.

Are there any stories Van Vogt wrote or that Gold published that you are paprticularly fond of? Or maybe not fond of?

Benson and Grafton

Leave a reply

Today is April 24, the birthday of A. C. Benson (1862-1925) and Sue Grafton (1940-2017).

Arthur Christopher Benson is the brother of R. H. Benson and E. F. Benson. All three wrote ghost stories. E. F. is the better known of the three. He was also the most prolific having enough to fill four or five collections. A. C. and R. H. have had their ghost stories published together in a single volume. Twice, as it turns out, although the ISFDB doesn’t list Ghosts in the House, published by Ash-Tree Press. That was the volume that introduced me to them.

It strikes me as odd that Ghosts in the House isn’t listed on the ISFDB under either A. C or R. H. Benson. They are usually more thorough than that.

But I digress.

All the Bensons wrote good ghost stories. They are, of course, in the classic English tradition. And well worth reading.

Sue Grafton created one of the first female private investigators in the character of Kinseu Milhone. The gimmick she used in selecting titles was to use the format Letter is for Someting. Her intention was to write twenty-six books, one for each letter of the alphabet. “Y” was the last volume she completed before her death.

I’ve only read a few of the short stories. I enjoyed them. I’ll be reading the novels. At the church garage sale a couple of weeks ago, my wife picked up most of the set. I’m not sure if she has all of them, but she has the first ones. That’s good enough for me.

RIP and Happy Birthday, Ian Watson

Leave a reply

I was checking to see if there were any folks I wanted to do a birthday post on. There were three, Donald Wandrei (1908-1987), Peter S. Beagle (b. 1939), and Ian Watson (1943-2026).

Wait, Ian Watson? I hadn’t realized Watson had died.

He passed away a week ago, on April 13. I checked Locus Online to see if I had missed their obituary. They posted it today. Today, Appril 20,  is his birthday.

Watson’s name may not be familiar to many of you. He was British, and he never seemed to catch on here in the States.

He wrote a number of novels, the most notable the Books of the Black Current series, as well as several in the Warhammer series. Watson was a prooific short story writer, as well as a poet. I first encountered his work in short form.  It’s been a number of years since I read his work, but it was always entertaining.

If you’ve not read him, Watson’s work is worth checking out. He had over 20 collections of his short fiction published. A number of his novels and collections are in print, many in affordable electronic editions.

Biggle and Williamson

Leave a reply

Today is April 17. It is the birthday of Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (1923-2002) and J. N. Williamson (1932-2003), Both men were primarily short story writers, although they did publish some novels.

Biggle wrote science fiction and mystery. His work at  times codused on the arts and how advances in technology would affect them.

Williamson wrote horror. Time may remmeber him more as an editor than a writer, though. He edited the anthology series Masques. It ran to five volumes and published some of the top names in horror fiction. Volumes I and II were combined in the paperback Dark Masques, and volumes III and IV were combined as Darker Masques.

Both men are pretty much forgotten these days outside of hardcore scinece fictiona nd horror fans, which is a shame since short fiction can have soem of the best stories.