BAKER, Kage 1952-

PERSONAL: Born June 10, 1952, in Hollywood, CA; daughter of George (a mail carrier) and Katherine (a painter) Baker. Ethnicity: "Native American/Scots/Welsh." Politics: Democrat. Religion: "Born Roman Catholic; nonobservant." Hobbies and other interests: Gardening, bird watching, folklore, history, Shakespeare, classic films.

ADDRESSES: Home—Pismo Beach, CA. Agent— Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc., 538 East Harford St., P.O. Box 278, Milford, PA 18337. E-mail—kagebaker@charter.net.

CAREER: Penncorp Financial, Santa Monica, CA, customer service representative, 1980-87; Pierce National Life, Los Angeles, CA, customer service representative, 1987-92; Living History Center, Novato, CA, general office worker, 1993-94; PhotoAd/EasyAd, San Luis Obispo, CA, customer service representative, 1995—. Teacher of weekend classes in the language and folklore of Elizabethan England, 1978—. Member of Historic Oaks Foundation, 1987-88. Has also worked as a graphic artist and mural painter.

MEMBER: Science Fiction Writers of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Joshua Award, for short story "A Night on the Barbary Coast."

WRITINGS:

"COMPANY" SERIES

In the Garden of Iden, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 1998.

Sky Coyote: A Novel of The Company, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1999.

Mendoza in Hollywood: A Novel of The Company, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2000.

The Graveyard Game, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2001.

Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers (short stories), Golden Gryphon Press (Urbana, IL), 2002.

The Life of the World to Come, Tor Books (New York, NY), 2004.

OTHER

The Anvil of the World (fantasy novel), Tor (New York, NY), 2003.

Mother Aegypt and Other Stories (horror), Night Shade Books (Mountain View, CA), 2004.

Also author of limited edition novella, The Empress of Mars, Night Shade Books. Contributor to science fiction anthologies, including The 17th Annual Year's Best Science Fiction, St. Martin's Press, 2000; Asimov's Utopias, Ace, 2000; The Year's Best Fantasy 2, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Eos, 2002; The 20th Annual Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, St. Martin's Press, 2003; The Silver Gryphon, edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern, Golden Gryphon Press, 2003; Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick, DAW, 2003; The Year's Best Fantasy 3, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Eos, 2003; and The Thackery T. Lambs-head Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeffrey Vandermeer and Mark Roberts, Night Shade Books, 2003. Contributor of stories and novellas to Asimov's Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Quantum, Realms of Fantasy, Silver Gryphon and Fictionwise.com.

Baker's "Company" books have been translated into German, French, Hebrew, and Italian.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Children of the Company and two more untitled "Company" novels, which will complete the "Company" series.

SIDELIGHTS: In just a short period of time, Kage Baker has emerged as a premiere author of time-travel science fiction by virtue of her "Company" series. The "Company" refers to Dr. Zeus Inc., a twenty-fourth century business that uses immortal cyborgs to travel through time in search of valuable art works, plants, and even human cultures. With restrictions, the Company loots the past and transports items and people into the future, ostensibly to preserve them from certain disaster in their own time periods. In the Garden of Iden introduces Baker's protagonists, two immortals named Joseph and Mendoza who, as the series progresses, begin to question the motives of the Company and their own fate at the hands of their superiors. A Kirkus Reviews critic called the series "hilarious, terrifying, sad, and provocative, and always utterly intriguing."

Baker's use of humor enlivens her series, but she also seriously explores philosophical questions about religion, ecology, the quest for immortality, and the tragic toll history takes on individuals. The author also has a sense of adventure and a writing style that attracts and keeps an audience. "Kage Baker is a terrific storyteller," noted Mervius in Fantastica Daily. "She gives us wonderful characters and puts them into situations that are both thought-provoking and wickedly entertaining. . . . There is grand adventure and dazzling imagery."

In the Garden of Iden introduces readers to Mendoza, whose specialty is botany, and Joseph, her mentor. Mendoza's story begins when she is just five years old and living in sixteenth-century Spain. It's the time of the Inquisition, and Mendoza is about to be tortured to death because she is Jewish when Joseph arrives from the twenty-fourth century. He rescues her so that the Company can turn her into an immortal cyborg, for which favor she is duty- and program-bound to work for them. Her first assignment is to go to England in the year 1553, where she, Joseph, and another Company employee named Nefer are to collect various herbs from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. Although they disguise themselves as ordinary travelers from Spain, their arrival arouses the suspicions of Nicholas Harpole, who is in the employ of Sir Iden. Harpole is a Protestant, and he suspects Mendoza and her colleagues of being part of the Spanish Inquisition. But when Mendoza falls in love with the intelligent Harpole, she knows her love is doomed because Harpole is likely to be the victim of Catholic zealots. She can, however, do nothing lest she risk changing the course of the future in a story that Library Journal contributor Susan Hamburger called a "witty debut" that "comments powerfully on religious hypocrisy and xenophobia."

Sky Coyote: A Novel of The Company is mostly about Joseph, who travels to California in the year 1699, just before the arrival of European invaders. His assignment is to save an entire village of Chumash people from being enslaved and wiped out by smallpox. In an attempt to convince the Chumash to come with him to a safe place set up by the Company in Australia, he pretends to be Uncle Sky Coyote, a mythical figure who promises to save them from the white men who are coming. However, convincing the Chumash proves more difficult than anticipated, and Joseph is handicapped by the fact that he cannot in any way change history. The plot is further complicated by the threat of a local monotheistic civilization that is targeting the Chumash people, and by a second storyline in which Joseph suspects that the utopia that is supposed to come to Earth after the year 2355 is really a diversion for something more sinister planned by the Company. Although the characters in this story come from 1699 California and the twenty-fourth century, the humor is derived from the way Baker takes potshots at twentieth-century culture. As one Publishers Weekly reviewer phrased it, "Baker nails her 20th-century targets: societal, religious and oh-so-personal hypocrisy."

In the third "Company" novel, Mendoza in Hollywood: A Novel of The Company, the author returns to the Mendoza character, who is now stationed in southern California during the Civil War. After the region's people are virtually wiped out by smallpox and a terrible drought, she finds herself with little to do. But her boredom is turned upside down with the arrival Edward Bell-Fairfax, a British secret agent sent to America to disrupt the Union's chances of victory against the Confederacy. What is startling about Edward, though, is that he looks just like Mendoza's former love, Nicholas Harpole. Indeed, it turns out that Edward is his genetic duplicate, and Mendoza cannot help but start to fall in love with him all over again. But this love leads to a dangerous choice of whether or not to help Edward in his quest to reestablish England's rule in North America. Once again lacing her story with comedic insights into modern culture, Baker this time targets the quirkiness of southern Californians in a story that Library Journal reviewer Jackie Cassada complimented for its "fast-paced action and good dose of ironic wit."

With The Graveyard Game, the fourth in the series, cyborgs Lewis and Joseph are on a quest to locate their comrade Mendoza. In the process, they begin to wonder what their future holds when their mission ends. Will they be commended and rewarded, or is there a darker future on the horizon? Susan Salpini, reviewing the book for School Library Journal, called it a "thrilling addition to a compelling story line composed of a unique blend of history, science fiction, mystery and touches of humor." A Publishers Weekly reviewer suggested that The Graveyard Game would be better understood by reading the earlier books in the series first, but that it "stands on its own and will entice newcomers to previous titles in the series."

Baker took a different tactic with her next book about the Company, Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers, which is a collection of fourteen short stories, rather than a novel. With this approach, the author is able to swiftly introduce other characters and themes concerning her Company universe, including a new character named Alec Checkerfield, who is a genetically enhanced boy of mysterious origins, a story where ordinary earthlings are shown to perceive the warring sides of the Company as a conflict between the gods, and witty tales in which Baker's cyborgs interact with famous historical figures such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Shakespeare. Critics roundly praised Black Projects, White Knights for its "funny, poignant, thought-provoking, altogether excellent stories," as Booklist contributor Roberta Johnson declared them to be. A Publishers Weekly reviewer went so far as to say the collection is even stronger than Baker's novels, asserting that "Baker shows greater range with these stories than she does in her novels . . . , and has more fun with her characters."

The ongoing mysteries in the Company series, including the true motives of Dr. Zeus, Inc., will eventually all be explained in the four concluding books that Baker has planned: The Life of the World to Come, The Children of the Company, and two more as yet untitled novels. But although fans may miss reading the continuing adventures of Baker's characters once the series is completed, the author has already shown that she is capable of writing other entertaining stories by publishing her first fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World. In an effort to leave his career as an assassin behind and live a more respectable life, Smith takes on a new job as a caravan master and then as a hotel resort owner in a strange fantasy world that includes everything from sorcerers to steamboat technology. Despite Smith's efforts to turn his life around, though, his plans become complicated when a disreputable journalist turns up dead in one of his hotel rooms, a health inspector gives him a hard time, and one of his caravan passengers, Lord Ermenwyr, shows up again as he flees a sorcerer. Top this off with a magical "Key of Unmaking" that threatens to kill off much of Smith's race, and the result is a "clever fantasy adventure," according to Cassada in another Library Journal review. Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, compared The Anvil of the World to "an Errol Flynn classic ebulliently re-imagined by Monty Python director Terry Gilliam." And a Publishers Weekly contributor added that "Baker successfully combines witty dialogue, well-drawn characters and an eye for telling detail."

Baker once told CA: "I was born in Hollywood, California, to a very large family. My father was a Metis-Iroquois disabled veteran of World War II; my mother was an American of Scots and Welsh descent, a landscape painter, and later a stand-in stunt double for films. My maternal grandmother completed work for a doctorate in literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but was denied the degree because professors felt women ought not have them. This rankled and was probably the reason I, as her oldest surviving granddaughter, was continually told I must be a writer some day.

"Obligingly, I began writing at age nine. Then I attempted a career in art. In 1972 I encountered the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura, California, and promptly joined in the capacity of bit player, playwright, teacher, language coach, stage manager, and office clerk. With Kathleen Bartholomew I wrote the booklet, 'The Mothers Wits' Guide to the Elizabethan Language,' until recently used to train actors at the Faire. I worked at the Living History Center, the Faire's educational branch, where I designed and coordinated living history programs for California schools. I met, loved, and lived under authentically primitive conditions with some of the greatest eccentric scholars, show people, and lunatics ever assembled in one unstable moment in time—the reconstructed reign of Elizabeth I.

"I also wrote and directed several minor Elizabethan-style street plays. These were performed on stages mounted on wooden carts, dragged around muddy roads by copiously sweating actors in woolen costumes and leather masks. The greatest theatrical challenge was avoiding killing the audience with the venue, especially when wheels came off during performances. Another challenge was declaiming lines over the passing march of Celts on the warpath, all of them screaming Braveheart-style.

"I paid rent through most of these years by a succession of lower clerical jobs, which could in no sense be construed as a career. During a long period of unemployment following my fortieth birthday, I turned to a serious attempt to sell stories and my first novel. The survival tactic eventually paid off. Now I am happily settled in beautiful Pismo Beach, Clam Capital of the World, in a charming seaside cottage which, unfortunately, is not haunted by the ghost of a dashing sea captain. I no longer perform at the Faire, though I am still teaching.

"My advice to aspiring writers is: learn from the greats, and get a lot of life experience. Take intelligent criticism as the free gift it is. Watch real people and listen to them; they are better than anybody you could invent. Get a good agent."

Kage Baker contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

I guess any autobiographical essay should start with acknowledgement of descent, to put what follows into context. Therefore—

I'll tell you a couple of ancestor stories.

A long time ago, a man went courting a girl, but fell in love with her younger sister.

He was the son of a well-to-do merchant; his name was Zadoc Marquis de Lafayette Jeffreys, and he was descended, or so the family legends had it, from the last Welsh prince of Wales. The older sister he courted was wise and good, and her name was Anne Hauser. The younger sister he married, who was young and pretty and inexplicably unhappy, was Emma Hauser.

All of this happened in the postbellum South, in case you hadn't guessed.

Mr. Jeffreys married the younger Miss Hauser, once the minor scandal had died down, and they had one child. She was a small sickly girl who required a lot of care, and she was named Kate. Shortly after her birth, Emma Hauser died. Family legends vary on why, but the consensus seems to have been a sort of inadvertent suicide.

Grief-stricken, Mr. Jeffreys then married the elder Miss Hauser. She proceeded to bear him a large and thriving brood of children who were simultaneously little Kate's half-siblings and cousins. Kate therefore spent much of her time in the household of her godmother, a sea captain's wife. As might be expected, she grew up the odd one out in her family, under a cloud of vague shame and whispers about her mother's death. She took refuge in books, developed a keen intellect and a certain steely pride.

Kate was able to demand a lot of her father, by this time an august patriarch: she was permitted to go to college. She became the first woman in North Carolina to obtain a driver's license. She studied literature, architecture, painting, theater. She seems to have fallen in love with a professor who had been encouraging her in her efforts to obtain a Ph.D. in English. When he died, she completed her thesis, but his successor was of the opinion that women oughtn't become Doctors of Philosophy. He further discouraged her efforts at becoming a writer.

That fact, probably more than any other, is why I am writing at this moment.

I don't know what combination of grief and wounded pride led her to require her father to let her live on her own in New York. There she started an architectural firm, with a kind male friend whose personal inclinations posed no threat to her virtue. They were reasonably successful, until Kate fell in love again.

She married a teak salesman named Mack Carmichael. They moved into a house she had designed, and on July 31, 1919—Lammas Eve, Juliet Capulet's birthday—my mother was born. She was christened Katherine Hurt Carmichael, after the sea-captain's wife. Before my mother was four years old, however, the marriage began to evaporate. The house in New York was sold; Mack's business required him to travel frequently. There were rumors of philandering. Kate moved back to her father's house for the birth of her second child. A boy was born, and died. The third child was a girl, named for her great-aunt and step-grandmother Anne Jeffreys.

Shortly thereafter Mack's mistress forced the issue with confrontations and threats. Kate's pride rose up like a cobra and she divorced Mack, forbidding him any further contact with his children.

So my mother grew up under an even blacker cloud of shame (a divorce! No father!) under her grandfather's roof. Her retaliation was to be a sullen unbiddable child. She took refuge in books, too, but dreamed of romance, happy families, handsome princes and fathers. She longed to escape into the paintings of Maxfield Parrish, Kay Neilsen, N. C. Wyeth. She kept her picture books all through her life, through a genteel migration from small town to small town as Kate moved from teaching job to teaching job. My mother hated the rootless life. She resolved to run away and find her father as soon as she was old enough. She had found one of his business cards, and kept it a secret.

However, when my mother was twelve, before she was able to do more than write him a tentative letter, Mack died of pneumonia. She kept the business card the rest of her life. The only means of rebellion left, apparently, was falling in love with a series of unsuitable boys.

Her sister Anne, by contrast, was a happy and obedient little girl. Kate, deciding to train up her daughters in the Arts, attempted to interest my mother in a life in Theater. Mother balked, dug in her heels, wouldn't learn lines. Anne, on the other hand, was willing to attend auditions and sing in front of strangers. So Zadoc (by now a practically Olympian figure, so august he was on the columned front porch of the great family house—God in a white suit) funded an apartment in New York, where Anne was trained by the opera singer Amelita Galli-Curci.

My mother, showing no inclination to do anything but draw handsome princes and swoon over Nelson Eddy, was offered art lessons at the Metropolitan Art Museum, as taught by Maxfield Parrish. She consented to go, but didn't shine; the other students were all young men, and she was only about thirteen, shy, and overawed by the Master at Work. She cut class, wandered through the Hall of Greek Statuary peering up fig leaves, spent her subway fare on Turkish cigarettes. In spite of her best efforts, however, she had talent, and she learned to paint.

Kate sent her to college, and she retaliated by falling in love with the captain of the football team. They were married when she was eighteen. She dropped out of college and went to live on his parents' farm while awaiting the birth of the baby.

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles broadcast his radio play of The War of the Worlds. Panic swept the Eastern Seaboard, as people tuned in late and thought they were hearing a real news broadcast about invasion by Martians.

My mother's own personal footnote to history: she was in labor in a rural hospital that night, and the staff was caught up in the general terror, and somehow no one could locate her obstetrician. There were complications. The baby's oxygen supply was cut off. She was born brain-damaged. I can just remember her, and she was a beautiful girl, with black hair and aquamarine eyes. Fair and delicate as a princess in a fairy tale; there was intelligence in her eyes, too. But she was helpless as a newborn, silent as a doll.

The husband, the in-laws, the doctors all advised the same: put the little thing in an institution and get on with your life. Appalled and furious, my mother seized up her child and fled to New York. That was the end of the marriage.

Anne had a budding career on Broadway by this time. Kate retired from teaching to become her manager. She lunched at the Algonquin; she knew Robert Benchley and Kurt Weill. When Anne's film contract offer came from RKO Studios, they left for Hollywood. My mother went with them, on the pretext that a drier climate would be better for the baby's health. She never went back. Coming into California, she saw the golden hills and groves of oak trees, like a painting by Maxfield Parrish, and recognized the landscape of her dreams.

Now, this is the other story, as it was told to me:

The Emperor Napoleon once decided to make himself Ruler of Egypt. He invaded that ancient land with soldiers, but also with teams of scholars, scientists, engineers. One of the engineers was named Boulanger, descendent of Burgundian innkeepers, and he built certain fortifications in Egypt that can be seen to this day. He had two sons. One of them fell in love with his brother's wife. In order to avoid bringing shame on his family, the son fled to Canada and became a fur trapper.

He was a man of iron. Once, when he was far back in the woods on a trap line, he cut his hand and the wound went to gangrene; so he heated an axe in the fire until it glowed red, and cut off his hand, and cauterized the wound with the broad of the blade. He took up with an Iroquois woman, the daughter of Chief Cardinal, and had many children. They married other Iroquois. Their descendants were trappers, fishermen, hunting guides and, eventually, bootleggers, all along the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The old women in the photographs have faces like rough-carved wooden masks. In one picture, an Iroquois couple in late Victorian regalia—leg-of-mutton sleeves on the lady's dress, the man with a derby hat and handlebar moustache—stand outside their house of skin and poles. There remain stories handed down of ghostly encounters in the north woods, canoes full of singing men that skimmed along the tops of the trees, spirits of malevolent ball lightning. The Wendigo was the worst of all, dangerous even to think about, best forgotten with the old ways.

Around 1910, Antoine Boulanger—a fat and genial hunting guide, sort of an Iroquois version of Wallace Beery—anglicized the family name to Baker, since it was easier to get work if one had a white man's name.

His grandson George Henry Baker was born on December 15, 1916, the oldest boy in a family of eighteen children. George was my father.

At the age of nine he was farmed out to an aunt, who put him to work on street corners selling doughnuts off a tray. She abused him; so one evening he simply took the day's proceeds and caught a streetcar in the direction of his mother's house. Realizing as he neared home that there was no room for him there, he kept going.

My father wandered for years, now and then catching some education in various Catholic Homes for stray boys, once traveling with an old woman who sold
fake patent medicines, once narrowly avoiding being sent to a chain gang. He rode the rails. He worked in lumber camps. He tried to make a living as an exhibition boxer, and broke all the bones in his hands. Eventually he reunited with his family, but he never stayed home very long. He grew up hard and tough, sharp and sarcastic. He had a romantic streak.

One rainy night he rode a freight car down from Oregon into California, and woke up in San Francisco, and liked it so well he stayed until the war broke out.

He never talked about what he did in the war. What I know, I found out mostly from his brothers: that he held the rank of Master Sergeant, and served in the O.S.S. That he was selected because he was a Native American, and had a powder monkey's license and a sharpshooter's certificate, and moreover because he collected postage stamps. That he was in Cairo at one time, and Karachi. That he caught malaria, and survived. That he was shot, somewhere in a green jungle in Burma, and invalided home with a Purple Heart.

He arrived back in California rail-thin, and got a job as a postman.

He shared an apartment in Hollywood with three other young men, one of whom was an Irish character actor named Sean McClory.

McClory invited him to a studio party one evening. It was being thrown by a starlet under contract to RKO. Did George want to meet movie stars?

My father went along, and regretted it. The party was held in a vast old house in the Hollywood hills, just above the Cahuenga Pass, where the starlet lived with her mother and sister. He knew nobody there; he was too shy to dance. He found a corner and drank too much, and passed out behind a couch.

When my father woke in the morning, he had some trouble finding his way out of the house, which was labyrinthine and silent as though utterly deserted. Descending stairs and opening what he hoped was the door to the garden, he found himself staring at a little girl lying motionless on a bed. She stared back. He had seen children with cerebral palsy before, but he was struck by the beauty of her eyes and a certain ethereal quality she had. He looked around uncertainly, and made to leave, but she cried. He was sitting beside her, making one-sided conversation and wondering whether he shouldn't try to fix her some breakfast, when my mother wandered into the room yawning.

George and Katherine fell in love, though my black-eyed father looked nothing like Nelson Eddy. George moved into the house, and they lived there together the rest of their lives. They had a lot of children. I was born in 1952, and named for Kate—who was still managing Anne's career—and for George's mother Genevieve. My mother began to paint again, in a desultory kind of way: studies of my father, of her children, a few landscapes. She taught herself to sculpt, and cast a few statues.

The past gave up its place. Zadoc was already gone, a portrait gazing down from the wall; when I was very small I was under the impression he was God. Anne his wife died, but young Anne married the elegant Robert Sterling and lived happily ever after. They starred together in the television series Topper, based on the supernatural comedies of Thorne Smith. I remember being a little bewildered by their exact earthly status. Did they really have ghostly powers? I wondered, longingly, if I'd ever be able to make myself invisible the way they did.

I would have preferred to have been invisible.

It would have been nice for my mother, after all she'd been through, if I'd been born a happy, healthy child. Unfortunately I was tiny, sickly and decidedly
unhappy, failing to thrive on any formula. Finally a neighbor, an old Englishwoman, recommended a mixture of goat's milk and catnip tea.

By great good fortune I was not transformed into an infant witch on this stuff, but was given the strength to survive rashes and fevers without number. Shortly before I reached the age of two, I developed strabismus in my right eye. It turned completely in toward my nose, eliciting no end of horrified comment from strangers.

I remember being in Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital before the operation, staring at the old black-and-white illustrations in a copy of Peter Pan as my mother read aloud to me. I was rather pleased to have her all to myself, for a change, as by this time I had two infant siblings.

After surgery I was sick, screamed and tried to pull the bandages from my face so persistently that the nurses bound my hands to the bed rail. I was, therefore, already disposed to be unhappy with my situation by the time my mother, removing the bandages at last, saw the black stitches and overcorrection on the eye. She shrieked: "Oh, my God, she's ruined!"

Which is probably the genesis for my books about cyborgs—flawed mortal children, undergoing painful surgery to transform them into immortals. It probably explains my lifelong fondness for pirates, too, since there isn't a lot else you can pretend to be when you have to wear an eyepatch. And of course every neurosis I claim for my own was born in that revelatory moment.

And, of course, I blamed everything on my mother and became sullen, rebellious, determined to be nothing like her, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, I escaped into books.

In 1955, my half-sister died of pneumonia. She was seventeen; it was remarkable she lived as long as she did. She had watched over us like a fragile angel, eerily beautiful, from her couch in the middle of the room. Both my parents seemed to feel she had some quality of the miraculous about her.

My mother was devastated at her death, and in the following year became much more devoted to the Church. There was also, however, a growing interest in questions of the physical realities of time and space. She began to read science fiction: not the space operas of the pulps but metaphysical stuff like Franz Werfel's Star of the Unborn and Robert Spencer Carr's The Room Beyond.

I think she had about come to terms with her daughter's death when, a year and a day later, her mother was killed.

Kate had never retired. She presided over Anne's career, she bought and sold real estate, she designed and built additions to the house. She read voraciously. Her intellect never failed her, but something began to be wrong. She experienced what may have been small
strokes, possibly seizures. The most terrifying episode occurred when she stepped into an elevator in New York, and remembered nothing else until she found herself getting out of a cab in front of the house in Hollywood.

But she continued to drive. One day, she parked in the sloping driveway of Anne's house in Beverly Hills and walked around the back of the car to remove a box of books from the trunk. She had forgotten to set the brake. She did manage to push her grandchild out of the way, though, as the car rolled unstoppably backward. She died in Anne's arms, there in front of the house.

My mother swayed with the shock of the double blow, with all the delayed horrible guilt of being a sullen, unbiddable, undutiful child, and perhaps she broke a little. She decided I ought to be a writer, to fulfill Kate's thwarted desire to write. She began to tell me all the family stories, of Zadoc and his wives, of Kate's steely determination, as a way of keeping faith. Someday, I would be a writer, and somehow or other that would mean my grandmother had not lived in vain.

I managed to keep all the Kates and Annes straight in my little head, but I resolved firmly never, ever to be a writer. I would run away to sea instead. Possibly even to Neverland. I would be a disappointment. That would show her.

My father never talked much. When I was about four, he did make an effort to introduce his daughters to their paternal ethnic heritage by reading to them from Hiawatha. It was not entirely a success. We screamed with laughter every time he got as far as "Gitche Gumee." Finally he gave up and bought us the Big Golden Books version.

Now and then, though, he told us the other stories, the ones about the canoes in the sky or why the Great Spirit made the tears of the maple tree sweet. He told us about the time he had fallen asleep in the woods, and woke by moonlight to find a timber wolf staring at him, and startled it off by hurling a handful of gravel at it.

Very much a stern military kind of father, he took it upon himself to show us various ways to disarm attackers. I never managed to become the deadly defensive fighter he wanted me to be (Daddy, I'm only four . . .), but he never gave up hope I'd kill somebody someday. As late as his eightieth year, he was still offering to loan me a bayonet with which to protect myself from young punks when I walked home evenings.

He kept his stress inside. With Kate no longer the family matriarch, the future wasn't as secure as it had been. Somehow or other a new baby was born every year, but he was still bringing home only $99 a week. The malaria came back, fits of fever when he was run down, icy chills. When I was six, in my first year at Blessed Sacrament School, he had a heart attack.

He lost his job with the Postal Service—evidently they decided to punish him for getting ill by cutting his salary—and employment was sporadic after that. He was forty, and prematurely gray. He failed dexterity tests because of the old injuries to his hands. He dyed his hair and took any job he could get. He had another heart attack five years later.

My mother, in desperation, painted. She sold a few canvases. She sold a few greeting card designs. She took a job with a commercial art studio that mass-produced hotel room art. It began to pay the bills. Possibly Kate's ghost smiled. Revenge!

My father began to make the rounds of the Sunday art shows, with folding display stands and my mother's paintings loaded into the back of a station wagon, along with a sign that read: K. C. BAKER ORIGINAL FINE ART. He was a good salesman. Between the two of them, they made ends meet.

I ignored them all, and lived in my own world.

Images interested me before words: the Maxfield Parrish paintings in the old books, the illustrative art of Harold Gaze, Frederick Richardson's illustrations for the Volland Mother Goose. I was desperate to know what the pictures signified. The meanings were hidden, encoded, could only be coaxed out of an adult. It took some time to learn how often one could repeat Mama, what does this say? without provoking an explosion of impatience.

So I made up stories to explain the pictures, until I learned to read for myself. Troubled with insomnia from an early age, I told myself stories in the dark, when everyone else was asleep. So far as memory serves, the stories were about boats and rivers, trees, castles, roads, and the occasional child-size airplane.

When she discovered that I could read for myself, my mother took me to the old Hollywood Branch Library and got me a library card, though as I recall I was too small to see over the librarian's desk. God bless you, Miss Wootten, wherever you are; I spent ten years of Saturdays just at the edge of your peripheral vision. Remember the very quiet child who sat in the corner from ten to four, and worked her way through everything except the science books? That was me. Five books a week every week from, say, 1957 to 1967. . . I can still see the long sunlight slanting in on the caramel-colored linoleum, and the sycamore leaves drifting down outside. No noise. Thank you for silence, Miss Wootten, and for not minding that I took out The Wind in the Willows about once a month.

I loved National Geographic magazine too, and we had years of its back issues at home. I liked the archaeology features best. The underwater excavation of Port Royal, the drowned pirate city, was my favorite. The studies of ancient civilizations fascinated me too, with their beautiful detailed paintings of ancient daily life. I loved the idea of reclaiming lost things from the past.

When I was five, I went through a phase of conducting my own digs in our back yard—my mother lost a lot of spoons that way—and occasionally found old horseshoes. Once, though, there was a nested group of little scallop shells, all pierced at the top; I think they must have been someone's necklace. And once, an inexplicable trove of glass marbles, lovely shades of amber and green and blue, treasure buried by some other child long before.

When I was about nine, I overcame my personal rebellion enough to give in to the temptation to write. Putting words down on paper was a disappointment at first; they lay there like lead on the lined page, utterly unable to convey the colors I saw inside. Blots and crossings-out acted like rocks, like logjams in the flow of the story, physical barriers slowing my imagination. The stories were deadly serious attempts at Ruritanian-style adventure. Kipling was my model for style, then and for years afterward.

The writing was an ostentatious secret. I carried my work around in a blue three-ring binder, and never let anyone (but most especially my mother) read the stories.

Real progress was only made when it began to dawn on me that words themselves had a power, that they could produce a tactile force if properly used, as for example Shakespeare used them. What see'st thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?

One summer when I was eleven, sitting with friends where a hose had been left to run on somebody's dichondra lawn, I experimented: we ran our hands over the grass, with the clear water bubbling under it, and repeated the words lush vegetation. The words amplified the sensation strangely. The others drew their hands back, shivered, exclaimed. It gave me an obscure sense of triumph.

And it was obvious that anybody could do this. Commercials on television played the trick: you could sell aspirin by simply repeating the words tension, pressure, pain like a mantra, throbbing sounds that almost gave you a headache all by themselves. All the great stories used words this way, all the great poems. You could blaze them like colors in a paintbox; you could stack them like bricks. You could affect people with them, if you chose them carefully.

Gleefully I read Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Blake, Melville, all the great wordsmiths. Captain Ahab's speech offering the gold piece to him that first spied
the White Whale! The glassy, cool translucent wave! Tygers burning bright! The baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers! Jellies soother than the creamy curd! I didn't understand half of what I read, but the kinesthetic effect of the words enchanted me.

My private writings took on a distinctly fantastical and Elizabethan cast. No unicorns or dragons; I was never much interested in the standard trappings of fantasy. There were no princesses or horses in my stories either. I wanted to write about spirits of fire and air, ships, speaking trees, and I borrowed from Greek mythology and for that matter every other mythology I could get my hands on. I had no interest in the science fiction my mother was reading at this time, though we had Bradbury's and Zenna Henderson's books all over the house. Neither would I watch Star Trek, though my mother was an avid fan.

When my words didn't catch fire sufficiently, I tried something else: illustrating them, with ornate margins full of decoration and elaborate capital letters, as much like medieval illuminated manuscripts as I could make them. Calligraphy was difficult, because I was left-handed and tended to smear ink from left to right; I invented letter styles that were easier to use. When I read that da Vinci had written right to left, I experimented with doing likewise.

And all the while this blazing interior life was going on, I was a shy, withdrawn, unpleasant child, a social failure, physically awkward. There was some speculation that I might be autistic. I do seem to have certain learning disabilities; I'm hopeless with numbers, nor am I especially able to follow a teacher's words in a classroom situation. When left on my own with books, I could grasp nearly anything, but in a room with thirty other children I became a tongue-tied idiot.

My mother sighed and made accommodation: perhaps higher education was not in the picture. Perhaps I would need a sheltering environment, peace and security in which I could become the wonderful writer she knew I was going to be. On my graduation from Immaculate Heart, she let me know that I could always stay at home, protected from the world, in order to have what I needed to write.

I moved out on my own and took a clerical job. And I wasn't going to be a writer, thank you very much; I would be a painter.

For the next couple of years I lived in a succession of studio apartments in Hollywood, and tried to make a name for myself selling hand-colored prints of my drawings. I sold a few. My mother got a couple of mural-painting jobs, and I assisted her. I loved color, I loved experimenting with composition and line. It failed to pay the bills, however, and in any case I had nothing like my mother's talent. The nadir of sordid economic reality was the week I lived on cauliflower.

I would never be an artist. It didn't matter. The world was about to change.

To paraphrase Robert Heinlein: other nations call Americans crazy; Americans blame all their craziness on California. Californians blame the craziness on Hollywood, and Hollywood blames everything on Laurel Canyon. Those who live in Laurel Canyon blame Lookout Mountain Drive as the source of all lunacy. Artists, musicians and actors have lived there time out of mind, in its odd little houses on its steep and twisting streets.

There was once a teacher who lived on Lookout Mountain Drive, and her name was Phyllis Patterson, and she decided that it might be a good idea to put on a fair at the local school. Everyone would wear Elizabethan costume. They would pretend they were at a Renaissance-era market fair. There would be a traveling players' cart, and actors would perform skits from the commedia dell'arte. The whole point would be to educate while entertaining.

Strangely enough, it was a howling success. Possibly the timing (it was the early '60s) was right; possibly the planets were in alignment in a way they never would be again, for such a collection of out-of-work actors, scholars and artists to pool their talents and come up with absolute magic. Certainly it couldn't have started anywhere but Lookout Mountain Drive.

Through the early years of that decade the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire expanded, moving from vacant lot to larger vacant lot until it settled at the old Paramount Ranch site. Phyllis's plan grew as well. The Faire would be an escape into another time, a journey through history. All the sets and booths would look as authentically Elizabethan as it was possible to make them. The actors—not just the Commedia troupe now but the inhabitants of the Elizabethan village, the Mayor, Lord Sheriff, Guildmaster, nobles, peasants and artisans—would learn the speech of Shakespeare well enough to improvise conversation with visitors. Every effort would be made to sustain the illusion.

To this end, Phyllis and her husband, Ron, founded the Living History Centre. Teachers were assembled, experts in Elizabethan music and theater. The rank and file of any production company were hired too, a Costume and Prop department, directors, spear carriers, painters, carpenters, musicians. A crew was necessary to hang awnings and park cars.

Through the later '60s the Faire developed a reputation as a giant love-in with a historical twist, a phantasmagoric hippie paradise where Robin Hood swung onstage at noon, busty wenches served bangers, and strong ale flowed in 16-ounce cups. At its best, it was truly like a timeslip experience, where you had only to blur your vision a little to believe you really were in an oak forest in the age of Shakespeare. At its worst it was still like being in the middle of a Fellini film.

One spring morning, prompted by a newspaper article that said the Faire was holding open rehearsals at Paramount Ranch, I went out with my sisters to see what it was like. That day set the course of the rest of my life.

The old ranch, used since the '30s by Paramount Pictures for outdoor shots, was about a hundred acres of rolling oak savannah, north of Los Angeles. It was set far back from the road, hidden by hills. In spring the meadows were green, crossed in a few places by seasonal brooks, and there were thickets of wild roses. The oak trees were like gods, some of them four hundred years old.

In this landscape, which might have been England, the Faire was coming together. The stages were already up, and half-costumed actors were rehearsing. Bully Bottom's donkey head leered out from a pile of props. Jugglers and stage magicians were auditioning their acts before a majestic-looking bearded man who sat at a card table. Musicians were rehearsing galliards, as a troupe of dancers in court dress practiced their steps. The raw framework of little mock-Tudor buildings was going up. Hammers pounded, power saws screeched. Ladies sat in circles under the oak boughs and sewed pearls on elaborate gowns.

And on one stage, before an audience of new recruits, a red-haired woman with a stentorian voice was holding forth on the uses of Elizabethan English, its correct pronunciation and glorious, complex flowers of speech.

These people were speaking my language.

I edged my way in among her students. I found a place, and stayed.

It was a village. It was a family, made up of brilliant kids and seasoned troupers, where anyone could rattle off passages of Hamlet while juggling flaming clubs. And they were historians, too: these people, like me, knew what a pannier was, what a shawm was, what a sumptuary tax was. We had all been children who read too many books, who had lost ourselves in those National Geographic illustrations. One gentleman of my acquaintance, as a little boy, had given his deceased parakeet full Egyptian funerary rites: mummification, linen bandages, meticulously hand-carved, painted mummy case and sarcophagus.

And we had a moveable feast, so to speak: the Spring Faire lasted six weeks, not counting rehearsals, and then moved up to the summer country north of San Francisco for another long run, and then in winter we all moved forward three hundred years and put on the Great Dickens Fair and Pickwick Comic Annual in San Francisco. For the next twenty-five years, this was my world.

There was the other world too, of course, the tedious colorless place where I held down a succession of pointless customer service jobs; but that one didn't matter. Real life was in that oak forest, and by God I lived.

I learned to act, and speak in public without stammering. I made lifelong friends. I slept in meadows under moonlight, back in Actor's Camp, and listened to stories told by lamplight under the trees. There was joy, and unspeakable beauty. There was love and death and unbearable heartbreak. The big parade, the whole technicolor pageant of human experience happened to me there. I never became more than a competent actress and minor playwright, but there were absolute geniuses who trod those boards, and I watched them closely. Some of them have been partially transfigured into the Immortals in my Company novels, but the truth is that they were already immortal.

Thank you, Phyllis. Live forever, O queen.

Friday and Sunday evenings during those years were frequently spent on a Mark IV bus, zooming up or down Interstate 5 to one of the Faires, in the company of about fifty other actors. We sang, rehearsed, got stoned, slept, fought, made up, argued about history. We stopped briefly in godforsaken places like Button-willow and Gustine for dinner breaks. Now and again the musicians got out their instruments, and we danced pavanes while waiting for our bus driver to return, to the bemusement of the truckers rumbling by. On one occasion we returned from the Burger King to find that one of our veteran character actors had set up a card table in the parking lot, draped it with a lace tablecloth, and topped it with a candelabra complete with lighted tapers. He sat at the table in full evening dress, sipping a martini.

The madness was necessary; it was a long ride. I spent hours staring out at the yellow hills of the Diablo range, or watching wind vanes beat against the stars in the Altamont Pass.

On one such summer evening I was watching the sun go down over that golden desolation, empty country stretching away for miles. I had an image of a woman there, trudging along purposefully. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and carried a pack. She was walking that endless back country because . . . she had a broken heart, and only the silence and the miles eased her pain? She had loved someone very much, and he had died.

But she wasn't alone, not all the time. There was someone to whom she had to report now and then. She'd resent him, but he was a father-confessor figure too. He was worldly-wise, crafty, Mephistophelean but possibly a decent guy, deep down inside.

Mephistophelean? Did they have some kind of special powers, these people? Maybe they were time travelers. I saw the pair of them slogging together toward San Francisco, the woman coming unwillingly and the man assuring her everything would be just peachy, and the woman saying: "Well, you'd damned well get me out of there before 1906." Her name was Mendoza.

Why was her name just Mendoza? Why did she resent the man at her side? What were they to each other, and how had they come to be in the back country of California sometime before 1906? Why were they time travelers, in fact, and for whom did they work?

I began to make notes. Before winter I was writing the first draft of what would eventually be published as In the Garden of Iden, though for years it was known simply as Mendoza, like its heroine.

When it ended, in the logical place in which it ought to end, I still hadn't explained how Mendoza came to be in California. Her mentor, Joseph, had become a far more interesting character than I had originally intended him to be, and moreover had developed a distinct voice of his own.

And I had definite reservations about this all-powerful Dr. Zeus Incorporated I'd invented. Yes, its masters did laudable stuff like saving endangered species and preventing the destruction of irreplaceable works of art. All the same, human nature being what it is . . . and given that they had been handed what amounted to absolute power. . . . No, there was certainly a dark

side to the Company. Everything I was able to observe of how big corporations worked, from my lowly station, told me so.

There was a lot more story to tell. Whether it was worth my while to tell it was another matter.

I have a good friend, Athene Mihalakis Kovacich, remarkable for her close resemblance to the Gray-Eyed Goddess, both wise and supremely witty. In real life she was an actress and choreographer, but she paid the rent by working as an assistant editor at a magazine. She loaned me notes from a seminar on getting books published; she kindly went through the first draft of Mendoza with a red pencil.

I survived the critique without bleeding too much, so it seemed worthwhile to try to get Mendoza published. The long, long procedure of transom submissions began. It took years. The book was marooned at Del Rey for ages, forgotten in someone's office. Steven Sterns at Ballantine almost took it; requested a rewrite, which I did. He shopped the rewrite around for a couple of years, and finally returned it to me with a regretful note explaining that Mendoza was good, but just not able to fit into a recognizable niche.

The Living History Centre had begun to run into financial trouble. Venues were lost; Chapter 11 was invoked; temporary measures were taken. It now cost a lot more in permits and insurance than it used to put on an event. Phyllis, who might have gotten rich if she'd copyrighted the idea of Renaissance Faires, hadn't. We in the costumed ranks soldiered gamely on, but there were dark clouds gathering.

My relationship with my mother had mellowed a little over the years. I still never let her read anything I wrote, Mendoza included, and she never accepted that I had run away with the Faire. But we were able to hold conversations; we even liked some of the same books. She was now a matriarch in her own right, up in her labyrinthine house in the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by children (most of whom still lived there) and grandchildren. She and my father had retired, and their comfortable income was supplemented by their adult children's salaries.

She painted, when she felt inclined. She cooked vast gourmet dinners. She babysat. She read, mostly science fiction, though she particularly enjoyed Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale, with its dream-like evocation of a New York that resembled the place of her childhood.

Around the beginning of 1992, she began experiencing abdominal pains. Tests were done. She had exploratory surgery and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She spent most of a month in the hospital, for what reason I cannot fathom; nothing was done to help her. She declined rapidly.

On the first day after she'd been moved from the ICU, I was sitting with her when my father came in. The diagnosis had just been explained to them, and as he bent to kiss her, their eyes met. They exchanged a look of hopeless, fathomless terror. The moment was a horrific revelation, shocked me outside myself. My own miseries of the heart seemed adolescent and self-absorbed. My mother was dying.

I went to her bedside every day after work. This was complicated by the fact that the Rodney King riots were breaking out at that time. My office was evacuated on the first day, as the fires and looting progressed up Western Avenue; when I went out to deposit my paycheck at ten o'clock, the bank was already nailing plywood over its windows, and an hour later we were sent home, just before rioters smashed into the lobby. The new corporate owners, unsurprisingly, decided Los Angeles was no place to do business, and made the decision to relocate to South Carolina, which would cost me my job.

Over near Hollywood Presbyterian, looters were breaking the windows of the Sears Roebuck where my mother had bought me my first typewriter. The hospital was not evacuated, but getting there through the traffic was taking my life in my hands.

I was about to turn forty, and the foundation of the world was crumbling under my feet.

But I sat with my mother, there in the same hospital in which, thirty-eight years earlier, she had sat with me as I'd screamed and clawed at the bandages over my face. I tried, now, to tell her about my attempts to become a writer. She was too ill to read Mendoza, or to grasp the whole storyline with all its subplots. In desperation, I made up a new story, a short one, about Joseph and Mendoza attempting to collect a rare plant, and having complications delay their mission. I acted it out for her. She liked it, I think.

After she died I wrote it down. Noble Mold was my first sale, years later, to Gardner Dozois at Asimov's.

Thank you, Mama.

Over the next few years, my life broke up and shifted. I left Hollywood and worked for the Living History Centre until its abrupt demise. I lived in a trailer in an oak forest north of San Francisco, and that was soul-healing and wonderful. I lived in a couple of furnished rooms in awful places, and that was desolation itself. I lived in a friend's spare bedroom for a couple of weeks, where I typed out the first few pages of Noble Mold. Mendoza came back from Ballantine at last—so sorry, but no thanks. Everything I owned was in storage, I had no job, and at forty-two no particular prospects either. I was a compass without a needle. Nothing to lose, at least.

I moved to Pismo Beach. It's a tiny place, seven miles long and a quarter-mile wide. Despite the fact that it has miles of beautiful beach and bills itself as Clam Capital of the World, Pismo remains little known outside of Warner Brothers cartoons. But it has a long history of sheltering artists who find their backs to the wall.

From the turn of the century up until the Second World War, the community of Moy Mell thrived in its southern dunes. They were writers, poets, mystics and idealists who founded a colony of squatter's shacks back in the sand hills. They lived by fishing, poaching clams and stealing vegetables from the Japanese-owned truck farms behind the dunes. Briefly, they published the Dune Forum, to which a number of distinguished people subscribed.

Pismo had a lot of comforting associations from my childhood, when we used to stay there on vacations, and it was a cheap place to live in 1994. A studio apartment was found with a tiny view of the sea, unemployment was filed, and trying to make a living as a writer seemed less stupid than some of the other things I had tried.

On Athene's advice, I found an agent. Virginia Kidd, grande dame of science fiction, was disinclined to look at Mendoza. Linn Prentis, her assistant, read it and felt I had potential; she persuaded Virginia to take me on as a client. It was Linn's idea to submit Mendoza to Michael Kandel, freelance science fiction editor for Harcourt Brace.

Thank you, Athene. Thank you, Linn. Thank you, Michael.

Over the next few years I acquired a four-book contract with Harcourt Brace, a nicer apartment closer to the sea; a surprising new lease on life for my theatrical career as the Living History Centre rose from its own ashes, reborn phoenix-like in As You Like It Productions; and my father.

My mother's death had altered him almost beyond recognition. Nearing eighty, he had become childish, fragile, querulous. He lived for a while with my sister Anne and her husband, in the old house in Hollywood, but I think the place was too haunted for him. He moved up to Pismo Beach and we found him an apartment two blocks away from mine.

To say that he was difficult would be an understatement. He had become alarmingly friendly in his old age, opening his door to complete strangers and salesmen of every variety. This alternated with flashes of paranoia, wherein he reported on all kinds of unsavory neighborhood activities to the PBPD. He grew violent at times, though never toward us, and I lived in terror of his arrest on assault charges. I could never manage to season his food to his satisfaction, but he wouldn't tell me so; he just wouldn't eat, and I'd find meals shoved to the back of his refrigerator.

A happy milestone was passed when the U.S. Government finally got around to sending him his medals, half a century after he had earned them, and I was astonished at their number and variety.

He dwindled, surrounded by his medals and pictures of my mother. He didn't seem to mind. Every time he had a doctor's appointment we had to put him on the train to the nearest V.A. hospital two hundred miles away, because his insurance didn't cover his treatment anywhere else. Finally, as his health continued to fail, we had to relocate him to a residential facility close to the hospital. He accepted it, smiling. The world was mattering less and less to him.

He died in August, 2001. A month later, when the tragedy at the World Trade Center occurred, I was haunted by the irrational conviction that such a thing would never have happened if my father had still been alive. There was also the cold rational realization that this was my generation's Pearl Harbor, and all the rules of engagement were unknown. The old world was in its grave. No chance to ask anyone older and wiser what we were supposed to do now.

So here I am, a writer, and a middle-aged writer of science fiction and fantasy at that.

Science fiction doesn't get a lot of respect. Some science fiction writers, like Margaret Atwood, frantically disavow any connection to the genre, claiming that science fiction is about rocket ships. In so far as her latest novel is set in the future and deals with the consequences of genetic engineering, I think the lady is deceiving herself. Or, at least, attempting to deceive others, and not very successfully.

It's not hard to see why she does it, though. The overwhelming public perception of science fiction is as Star Trek and Star Wars. Explosive special effects, bad acting, worse dialogue . . . and let's not forget those fans who wear Star Fleet uniforms to church. Most people don't think of science fiction as books at all, other than the countless franchise novels set in the SW/ST universes.

This isn't true, of course. But, thanks to three-day conventions in hotels in major metropolitan areas, where other hotel guests gape at a constant parade of fans dressed as Klingons, barbarian queens and Power Rangers, the perception has become entrenched and inalterable. Indeed, in recent years the emphasis seems to be shifting from films to anime and plastic toys. Even the Sci-fi Channel has begun scheduling bogus psychics in its primetime slots, rather than sci-fi. The last few big-budget science fiction films all more or less bombed. Star Trek, after a long run, has abruptly, ignominiously declined, and Star Wars . . . oh, let's not even talk about it.

So that's what most people see, and no wonder Ms. Atwood wants to distance herself from it. The fact remains, though, that science fiction as literature has a long, honorable history, and will continue to be written as long as anyone, anywhere speculates about possibilities. Is Frankenstein the first science fiction story? What about the Greek god Hephaestos making mechanical servants, that moved and spoke? If you want to lump science fiction in with its sister genres of horror and fantasy, the case can be made that this branch of literature extends back as far as the Gilgamesh story.

No, Ms. Atwood, it's not about rocket ships.

But why do I write science fiction?

Well, it'd be damned hard to write a story with a cyborg time-traveling heroine otherwise . . . Seriously:

I came to the genre as much of an outsider as I could well be, in my determination to be nothing like my mother. Though I did my best to avoid them, certain influences worked during that time in which I hadn't quite grasped just what I was rebelling against. The television set was never silent at our house, and some of the early anthology series, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, seeped into my cerebral cortex without any conscious intent on my part to watch them. The old Twilight Zone series, with its adaptations of stories by masters like Charles Beaumont, William Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, taught me a lot about telling a good story with economy.

Twilight Zone was unique, too, in that Rod Serling respected his fellow writers, and never felt a script was too "literary" for television. Those writers were veteran storytellers, deft at involving the reader by creating memorable characters in interesting situations. Their science fiction stories were never ponderous with technology, but used it as a point of departure for exploring the human condition. Their fantasy stories were breathtakingly original, at least in this sad era when fantasy seems limited to quasi-medieval settings that involve swords, wizards and quests.

Science fiction, as the literature of ideas, offers (even within its oldest tropes) a greater range of possibilities for original story settings. It's that simple. At its worst it sacrifices story and style for technology, or is geekily self-referencing, or has wooden characters that serve to promote a leaden ideology; but when it's done well—damn, it soars. It excites. It raises questions. Makes you think.

There is a theory that science fiction writers, beginning with Jules Verne or even Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, serve a sort of evolutionary purpose in the development of human consciousness. If the destiny of Humanity is to explore the stars, science fiction is our psychological preparation for it. If we are to avoid pitfalls as our technology becomes more complex, we'd do well to read cautionary stories like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. If we ever develop artificial intelligences, robots, whatever—we know already that there are ethical and moral consequences, thanks to Isaac Asimov. Or Mary Shelley or Karel Capek, more accurately.

I don't know that I buy into all this. I neither know nor care whether future generations will colonize other worlds, personally. I do like telling a good adventure story, though.

Mendoza was retitled In the Garden of Iden, and has done remarkably well for a book that took so long to earn anyone's trust. To date it has seen British, American, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Israeli editions.

It was followed, in 1999, by Sky Coyote, in which the narrative point of view shifted from Mendoza to her mentor, Joseph, and the action of the story moved forward to central California in the year 1700. I drew on the legends of the local Chumash tribes for Sky Coyote, weaving them in with Joseph's growing unease about the true nature of the Company he serves. Also, I used this story as a platform to deal with certain perceptions that have long irritated me, as at least a partial Native American.

The least of these was Tontospeak, and it's interesting to note that I drew some criticism from reviewers because I had my Chumash characters speaking in fairly literate colloquial English, in an attempt to depict how they would have sounded to themselves. Reviewers not realize Native Americans have heap plenty articles in own grammar, evidently.

With Mendoza in Hollywood the narrative voice shifted back to Mendoza, and in Mendoza's depictions of El Pueblo de La Reina de Los Angeles, a town perennially given to violence and disaster, I dealt with some of my own despair at problems in the old home dystopia. This book was also my tribute to the movie industry, on whose fringes I grew up. My mother worked as a crowd extra/stand-in/stunt double at RKO for most of the 1940s, and Hollywood has a permanent place in our family legend—rather like a chain-smoking old aunt with a scandalous past, who still keeps showing up at family gatherings with a bottle of dubious booze and an underage boyfriend. The old girl has no morals, but she can always be counted on for great stories.

After The Graveyard Game, Joseph's book and a deeper exploration of dark Company politics, I was approached by Golden Gryphon Press to do a collection of some of the Company stories that had been appearing in Asimov's over the previous four years. Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers appeared in 2002, and astonished everyone, myself included, by selling out the first edition in one month.

The Company took a temporary hiatus for the next book, a fantasy based in a universe I'd been creating since earliest childhood. The Anvil of the World owes a lot to the golden age of book illustration, and to those preliterate days when I stared at Maxfield Parrish's paintings, or N. C. Wyeth's, or Frederick Richardson's, and tried to imagine what it would be like to live inside the pictures. Too, I wanted to give an impression of what high fantasy might be like if Noel Coward had written it; and there was a definite influence from Thorne Smith.

As of this writing (late 2003), the next Company novel is being prepared for publication, and another collection is in the works.

Will I continue to wrote science fiction? Probably, for the reasons listed above. Certainly Mendoza's epic struggle against Fate and Dr. Zeus will run its intended length. But there are undoubtedly other fantasy stories on the horizon, and conceivably a historical novel or two.

Where do I get my inspiration?

This summer I returned with my sister to the site of As You Like It Production's northern Faire, held in a high valley west of Stafford Lake in Marin County. The hillside meadows were still green; the oak trees, ancient and immense, made green islands of shade in the glittering July heat. We threaded our way between tents and booths under construction, past outdoor classes in voice projection, fencing, courtly dance.

We pulled up at the construction site where a cheerful bunch of volunteers—second-and third-generation cast members, some of whom I have known all their young lives—were building the set of the village tavern. My sister plays the Innkeeper; nowadays I don't do much more than serve nut-brown ale and sit on the sidelines,
pontificating. She hurried off to deal with a lack of battery chargers. I got out of the car and took my bearings. All around me, the past was shimmering on the surface of the present.

Sunlight on the greenwood, the distant sound of a galliard being played, and just over there a half-finished stage, the carpenters on a break. In their absence, a handful of actors were using the rehearsal space to block out a scene. A Midsummer Night's Dream again, yes; Oberon's speech to Puck. Bully Bottom's head was still down there somewhere, still leering out from some pile of props after all these years. I nodded and murmured the old, old words with the young actors: I know a bank where the wild thyme grows . . .

Wild time indeed.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Analog Science Fiction & Fact, March, 2003, Tom Easton, review of Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers, p. 137.

Booklist, December 15, 1998, Roberta Johnson, review of Sky Coyote: A Novel of The Company, p. 730; February 1, 2000, Roberta Johnson, review of Mendoza in Hollywood, p. 1010; December 15, 2000, Roberta Johnson, review of The Graveyard Game, p. 793; September 1, 2002, Roberta Johnson, review of Black Projects, White Knights, p. 69; August, 2003, Ray Olson, review of The Anvil of the World, p. 1967.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2000, review of TheGraveyard Game, p. 1650.

Library Journal, November 15, 1997, Susan Hamburger, review of In the Garden of Iden, p. 78; December, 1998, Jackie Cassada, review of Sky Coyote, p. 162; December, 1999, Jackie Cassada, review of Mendoza in Hollywood, p. 193; October 15, 2000, Jackie Cassada, review of The Graveyard Game, p. 108; July, 2003, Jackie Cassada, review of The Anvil of the World, p. 132.

New York Times Book Review, January 21, 2001, Gerald Jones, review of The Graveyard Game, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, December 8, 1997, review of In the Garden of Iden, p. 59; March 15, 1999, review of Sky Coyote, p. 52; January 3, 2000, review of Mendoza in Hollywood, p. 62; December 4, 2000, review of The Graveyard Game, p. 57; September 2, 2002, review of Black Projects, White Knights, p. 59; June 30, 2003, review of The Anvil of the World, p. 61.

School Library Journal, April, 2001, Susan Salpini, review of The Graveyard Game, p. 171.

ONLINE

Fantastica Review,http://www.mervius.com/books/ (March 13, 2001), Mervius, review of Sky Coyote.

Kage: Her Site,http://www.kagebaker.com/ (February 2, 2004).

Rambles,http://www.rambles.net/ (March 20, 2004).

SF Site,http://www.sfsite.com/ (March 13, 2001), Rich Horton, review of Sky Coyote; (August, 2002), Nick Gevers, "In the Company of Cyborgs: An Interview with Kage Baker"; (December 15, 2003), Gabe Mesa, review of The Anvil of the World.