Kage Baker grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. And she read voraciously. In a stroke of remarkable good luck, so did her mother, who developed a fondness for fantasy novels when I loaned her my copies of Gormanghast. The good luck paid off with Mrs. Baker’s generosity – she not only borrowed all our books, but she also constantly loaned her own purchases to us. And she could buy a lot more than we could! 

Mrs. Baker was a painter – portraits and landscapes – and she was good. However, the life of a painter is rarely rich or sumptuous, and she had 6 kids to raise. She usually worked at home, then took her finished work to art shows to sell. These art shows were often in malls, and the first thing she did was locate the bookstores and candy stores; we’d go to visit and be handed a bag full of new books and See’s chocolates. Good times!

Mr. Baker was a mailman, but a mailman doesn’t make a royal amount of money, either. And then he had a heart attack when Kage was small, and thereafter he was more or less a house husband; he took small jobs when he could, usually as a delivery man for a florist, but again – not a high-paying job, except in free plants. They had the best garden in the neighborhood, with all manner of exotic flowering plants; and Mrs. Baker’s studio had orchids flowering all over.

So, this was a sort of adolescent idyll, filled with See’s chocolates and free books. Kage wasn’t quite living in her parents’ house, but it was hard to move out once Mrs. Baker had taken you in. That was how I became her beneficiary, too: I was Kage’s pal and occasional chauffeuse, and that was enough for her to claim me as one of her own.

With a wider array of fantasy and science fiction to explore, Kage’s tastes began to settle into definite shape. And one of the first things she decided was that she loathed, abhorred, despised and detested (to quote Judy Garland*), trilogies. This was a major heresy in the 1960s and 70s, because following J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings trilogy, everyone was reading and writing trilogies. It was de rigueur, practically an unwritten rule. Lots of readers loved this, though the wait between volumes could be annoying; on the other hand, some writers decided to write absolutely enormous novels and I, for one, loved those outsized, horse-choking books. They were a lovely abundance.

When Kage sold her first novel, she was already well into Number 2; when she sold that, it was the same with Number 3. Sometimes she would have 2 or 3 finished manuscripts on her desk – but when her agent or publisher suggested marketing some as a trilogy – she refused, with varying amounts of courtesy – which meant she handed it off to me, and I used my oily, obsequious charms to dissuade them of the idea of a trilogy. I managed to do it without explaining that Kage had hated ’em from her teenage years because her dear mother bought too many.

Anyway, Kage insisted on having all her Company books published separately. I’m afraid she rather gloated over the few reader complaints she got. “What do they want me to do?” she would ask. “Write less? I can do that …” And she would giggle, I’m afraid. Not that she ever would have written less – I don’t think she was capable of it – but she could have let that stack of finished manuscripts continue to sit on her desk, collecting occasional Coke stains …

Luckily, it never came to that. I’ve lost track of all the styles in which her books have been published since she died: but there is probably a trilogy presentation in there somewhere. Heck, sometimes I can’t even read the covers, she’s been published in so many languages. But I have always done my best, so if an angry ghost of Kage Baker is haunting some publishing clerk … they have my sympathies, but they were warned.

On my part, I sleep unafraid. Of Kage and furiously brandished trilogies, anyway.