Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker is dancing somewhere in the Uttermost West. She is swigging rum from her battered old pewter cup with the  seahorse handle – though I’m sure it’s got a girlie red parasol sticking out of it. But it’ll have a tiny cutlass, too, with lots of maraschino cherries impaled on it like candied heads; and maybe an undead monkey clinging to a swanky glass swizzle stick, too. She’ll be celebrating, you see.

The Queen’s Anne’s Revenge has been found! http://tinyurl.com/3qoe763

That was Blackbeard’s flagship: that would be good old horrible Edward Teach for any of you lubbers insufficiently acquainted with the history of the Golden Age of Piracy. She was the Queen of his armada: huge, fast, beautiful, armed to the teeth. (That Blackbeard had an armada was only part of his blood-curdling success.) She was scuttled off  the coast of North Carolina, just before Blackbeard and his jolly, wicked crew sailed off to Ocracoke Inlet and the last, best, worst, craziest pirate barbecue ever.

It’s assumed by some scholars that Blackbeard sank the Queen Anne’s Revenge because he intended to survive Ocracoke and go back for his treasure when he’d gotten rid of a lot of that jolly, wicked crew – not only do dead men tell no tales, they don’t demand shares of the loot, either. He was justly notorious for deciding his crew was disposable, and the indications are good that he had enough gold stashed away to head off happily into the sunset and retire.

However … the party at Ocracoke  got out of hand. It ran a little over. Everyone was drunk, no was keeping watch, the Governor of North Carolina sold out his dear business friend Edward Teach to the British Navy. Maybe Blackbeard himself told off the Brits and meant to have them clean up his inconvenient crew – there a lot of theories about how it happened, and why he left the Queen on the bottom of the sea before he sailed for Ocracoke.

Regardless of Blackbeard’s reasons, it’s what happened. He might have escaped nonetheless, if the man who cornered him had not been Lt. Robert Maynard – the oldest lieutenant in the British Navy, and reportedly pretty bad-tempered about it. Maynard was not a happy man and was not made any more cheerful when he ran his ship aground trying to get to Blackbeard. While Maynard held Blackbeard more or less at bay in hand to hand fighting on his own deck, a British sailor with a claimorgh cut off Blackbeard’s head. It took two hacks, even with a claimorgh; after which, it is reported that Blackbeard’s body leaped overboard and swam 7 times around the ship …

His head went back for trial and display. No one ever found his treasure or the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Most everyone else got hanged. Maynard still didn’t get a promotion and died a lieutenant. No happy endings here, I’m afraid; although a hell of a story.

But now! Now she has been found, the queen of pirates all! Actually, it turns out she was found 15 years ago, and the researchers have been more or less sitting on the formal identification all this while … who knows why? They have had to admit they found her because of a coming display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort: which would otherwise have had to be titled something like “Some Stuff That Might Be From Blackbeard’s Pirate Ship”…

Awkward, that. Though it is amusing to wonder if, behind the scenes, there is still some wrestling going on over who gets all the loot aboard the Queen Anne … cursed pirate gold, haaar!

Whatever the reasons, she is found and properly identified now, and there must be much rejoicing in pirate-minded paradises everywhere. Hence Kage with her triumphal cocktail;  presumably now dancing a two-hand with a tall, blackavised villain with his grinning head underneath his arm …

Kage Baker was better than most people at finishing projects. She was fiercely determined, and she usually had a project plotted out in its entirety before she began it; often with flowcharts, models and a detailed precis to consult. It’s how she managed to produce so many books and stories in her brief career: she never willingly stopped.

When inspiration in one medium faltered, Kage sometimes changed to a different one. When she designed sets for Faire events, she sketched them first – but if they proved recalcitrant, she simply built them, in miniature: first water colours (I have sketchpads with studies for both a ruined chapel and a full-scale Tudor inn), then – usually – models in clay or model lumber. Did you know, Dear Readers, that you can get scale miniatures of just about every piece of standard lumber? When Kage found that out, in her 20’s, she went nuts. (I recommend Kit Kraft,  in Studio City.) All the Inns we built for various Faires began as piles of dollhouse lumber on the dining room table. Kage designed tiny eccentric trusses while fending off Harry’s attempts to gnaw on the rafters beams.

However, between being left-handed, only vaguely mathematical and uninterested in standard engineering concepts, Kage’s blueprints and instructions were … bizarre. The carpenters in our troupe (affectionately dubbed the Chaos Construction Corps) meekly accepted her peculiar instructions and then translated them into normal geometry- lest they accidentally build a dimensional warp into a corner of the tap room. Peepholes and hidden entrances still tend to show up every few years, though.

Kage did the same thing with her books. The time line for In the Garden of Iden was a multi-coloured flowchart in three languages, that went around two walls of the library. It was sheets of yellow lined legal pads, taped together …  Her notes for stories, rather like da Vinci’s fabled doodles, contain little figure studies and machines in the margins.

I have a carved doorpost in bright polychromed wood, representing some legendary hero of The Children of the Sun – it hung by our front door for 30 years. Kage whittled it out of a piece of scrap lumber with an Exacto knife, while working on the first drafts of what became The House of the Stag. It was known to send door-to-door missionaries fleeing before they even rang the bell, so strangely pagan it looked.

There’s an entire romance concerning the eventual marriage of Gard’s and the Lady’s first born son, the Magnificent Variable Erdway (known to his brother Ermenwyr as the Beautiful Idiot, but you know how boys are …). It’s an illuminated manuscript in water colours and inks, hand-scripted, with amazing capitals. Kage did it while agonizing over how the hell to make her cyborgs work in the Company series – she was seriously considering clockwork, but ended up saving that for the Anvil universe.

So Kage didn’t finish everything linearly – it was years after she got the Company operatives working before she wrote about the clockwork carts of the Children of the Sun – but she finished nearly everything. Eventually. By strange and often recycled means, but she did get to them. It’s those unfinished projects keep me busy now; it’s the weird bits intruding into each of them from other dimensions and stories that distract me and slow me down.

And in the meantime, the final fiddly bits of Ancient Rockets are being slotted into place by the excellent folks at Tachyon. And Subterranean just courteously reminded me I need to get some flap copy to them for  Nell Gwynn II – and here I’ve been wasting time for the last week, caught up in the notes for a fantasy so old the ink’s all turned green and it’s illustrated with crayons. I’ve been having fun, but there’s work to do!

Time to channel some of that determination that drove Kage. Some more of it. Maybe I need to borrow some of Michael’s old Legos, and see if a model of the shattered Dome of Mars II will help me work out my heroine’s path through the rubble …

Kage Baker was not really very fond of nonsense. She enjoyed all manner of japery and wit, and could – as she said, quoting the Bard – “gleek upon occasion” herself. She loved weirdnesses and oddities. She just didn’t care for silliness. Nincompoopery. The Marx Brothers, yes; the Three Stooges, no. As for Jerry Lewis – well, as WWII also proved, a whole lot of Frenchmen can be wrong.

She didn’t even like Lewis Carol, I’m afraid. She adored the John Tenniel illustrations, though, and never forgave Disney for changing them – but she couldn’t abide the books. Not though I loved them and pressed them on her repeatedly; not even though John Lennon admired Through the Looking Glass.

Except for the Walrus and the Carpenter. She saw them as a really scary science fiction horror story, and loved the poem. Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax frightens baby Alec and Nicholas with that poem, because someone once scared the hell out of Kage with it.  We used to sing it on long dark drives along I-5, giggling and swearing at the unnatural shadows beside the road …

Today, the sea is boiling. It looks like it is, anyway – I looked through all my palantitri along the California coast this morning, and the whole border with the Pacific was a mass of hot fog. Low, curling banks of it shimmering head-high at Pismo Beach; creeping up the narrow valleys below Big Sur to lap the redwoods with burning silver. Out on the sea at Pismo, a pair of dolphins was arching along in long leaps at the surface, leaping right out of the warm mist at the apex of every jump … the entire Pacific is seething like a pot of soup out there.

Here, inland, I peer at the blue water and sigh longingly. Not going out to find it, though – it’s freaking hot out there, and for all I know, the sea is boiling. The world is weird enough lately to allow it. Earthquakes and hurricanes in Virginia – tidal surges in New York. August rain in California, which I was pretty sure was forbidden by statute lest it cut into DWP profits.

And, of course, the usual crop of weird news cropping up out in the world. A giant frog was found in Malaysia – reputedly as big as a 7-year old child. It was photographed, someone informed the newspapers, and then it was – eaten. Like the living fossils, bushy-tailed tree rats and coelocanths: hey, we’re humans! When in doubt, eat it.

Dolphins are beginning to use tools – conch shells, sponges. Polar bears turn out to have originated in Ireland, while black bears are taking to spas and pools in the San Gabriel mountains, apparently preparing for a new aquatic life. All cats are evidently natural chimeras – not too surprising, that what is un-natural for everything else is natural for cats …

Parrots, it appears, name their babies – and the names are learned by the nestlings and retained for life. My Harry apparently thinks his name is the melody of Rule, Britannia. Or maybe he thinks it’s my name; maybe his name is  that special, lilting”Hi!” he uses. Or a meow. Whatever, it’s pretty obvious that when Velociraptors began their long evolution into birds, these got the brains:

Hey, mammal, want some nice land in Florida?

On the other hand, these got Gramma’s feet:

I eat badgers ...

Man, it’s a strange world. Sillier than Kage liked, but every bit as fabulous. And that’s why the sea is boiling hot.

Kage Baker was a person of ferociously held convictions. Nor did she change her mind easily or readily. In fact, the best way to force her into a relentless entrenchment was to try to change her mind. The mere fact of opposition set up a defensive stiffening and hardening of her attitude – like emotional Kevlar.

Nonetheless, one could leave out morsels and tidbits of information, and she very likely would come out to taste eventually. Suspicious, glitter-eyed, with avoidance reflexes like a squirrel on caffeine – but when she stopped that levitating and jetting off in the opposite direction behaviour, Kage could be convinced to sample a new fact. And since she was pretty logical, once the reflexive denial wore off, she’d adjust her stance if the new data was convincing.

One of the things she taught me, though, was that not everyone can be convinced to share your viewpoint. Another thing was that most such disagreements can be dealt with in courtesy and peace; but that carried the dark corollary that most people don’t want you to acknowledge their opinion while you disagree: they want you to capitulate and admit defeat. And in those cases, Kage taught me,  never, ever  do that.

Be silent, if you must. Withdraw from the argument, decline to be drawn. Turn – if not the other cheek – at least away. The veracity of your beliefs does not require that they be the loudest, nor the most shared, nor the least tolerant of others. Your own most important beliefs don’t require a single freaking thing except you and your own courage to hold fast.

I’ve seen her debate various topics at many conventions, bright-eyed and involved and as cheerfully fierce as a cartoon pirate: it was all in good fun. I also remember seeing her withdraw subtly from people who could not contain their anger at being opposed. When one such lady demanded of Kage, partway through a panel, why she was being so quiet, Kage leaned into the microphone and said, “We can’t talk to each other. We don’t speak the same language. I’ll be glad to wait while you yell everything you have to say.”

Kage got applause. The lady fell into fulminating silence. The relieved moderator returned the panel from Buffy the Vampire scripts (which the angry lady had unsuccessfully tried to sell) to the importance of research in alternate history stories … thus reversing the left turn into the Twilight Zone engineered by anger.

My sister Kage was shy. She hated conflict. She was afraid of yellers and angry people. But she showed me how to quietly stand up to them, how to depart the field of battle when you didn’t want to fight but would not surrender. Important lessons.

I am brought to these ruminations by two unrelated, unpleasant experiences last night.

First, idly following links online, I discovered something called “Dominionism”, a shade of colour in the fundamentalist politico-Christian community of which I was previously unaware. I’d like to think it’s up there with death panels, the aliens who keep visiting the White House, the ghosts in the Lincoln bedroom and other such myths of American politics – but apparently it’s not. Scary stuff. And its devotees don’t subscribe to the Marquis of Queensbury rules; I  got into a late night comments war that was positively psychotic – only as a bystander, but the acid burns kept me awake a while.

Then I foolishly got into an actual argument, elsewhere and on another topic, that degenerated into name-calling and similar vitriol. With an utter stranger, who evidently had somehow acquired secret knowledge of me that entitled him to wax furious on several aspects of my private life … all over a fight in which, as they say, neither of us actually had a dog.  After a couple of astonished gasps, I took my fish-out-of-water self back to my little dark pond, and read a work on evolutionary development until I could sleep.

I think I am going to stay quietly in my private pool  for a while, and repeat Kage’s lessons to myself. The water out there in the abyssal plain is full of crazy fish.

Kage Baker was a salamander. She was djinn, conjured from smokeless fire on the conjoined edges of sand dunes and a hot sea, where the exhalation of the desert and the wind from southern isles mingled like lovers’ breath. She was a fire elemental; and among the roses and tulips of her garden there were always succulents like small strange reptiles, and a Crown of Thorns bush gnawing slowly at the porch rail.

In hot damp air like today (Los Angeles is currently enjoying the trailing edges of a tropical storm out of Mexico), Kage’s hair would curl madly. The weight of her braid dragged most of it flat, but all around her head it would rise like a thunderhead, copper and gold and burgundy and ruby red strands floating like the prophet’s warning mane out of Coleridge. Sparks and parrots played in it.

Me, I’m more of an aged  cha siu bao – pale, sweating, spongy.

We’ve got the lights off and the fans on, holding off on the A/C as long as we can. The major appliances are waiting for tonight, the dish washer and washing machine loaded but in hibernation until there’s less drain on the power grid. The cats and the Corgi are doing their world-famous tippet imitations in the draft paths, and only the parrot is at all awake. Harry is singing the theme to The Wrong Box and looking appalling; he’s bathed in his water cup and all his feathers are wet and flattened, showing off the alien contours of his weird little body. There’s a velociraptor under all that fluff.

It’s too freaking hot to do anything. And I am expecting the power to go down sometime today anyway. But until it does … there’s ice cream in the freezer and a Dr. Who marathon on telly. Oddly enough, my boiling brain is somehow throwing up story ideas – must be the convection currents, you know, like the ones that bring carrots to the top of the soup pan. Time to type as long as I can manage. I may end up writing in long hand by candle light, but it wouldn’t be the first time. It’s kind of inspiring, as long as you don’t set your notes on fire.

So I am going to leave you, Dear Readers, to your own survival devices and go spend what time I have left writing fiction. And watching Dr. Who. And eating a Magnum Bar, the kind with caramel under the Belgian chocolate.

I cordially recommend the same to all of you.

Kage Baker would usually melt if the weather got hot and humid. It used to be rare in Los Angeles – rare enough that she found it a reasonable response to go hide in a movie theatre when it happened.

We saw some odd, and sometimes surprisingly good, films that way. I don’t think I’d ever have seen The Shadow otherwise; but hiding from triple digit heat and humidity made it one of the best action films I’ve ever seen … ambiance is so important.

At noon here it was 92 degrees. Then it dropped – whoosh – down to 82 in less than an hour. Sadly, the humidity went from 19 to 34 per cent. Now the humidity has stabilized but the temperature has crept back up to 93. There’s a chance of rain. Also of dry lightning, which is a weather phenomenon that traditionally sets California on fire – last time we had a summer storm with dry lightning, over 1,000 fires started in one day; some burned for the next 6 months …

In the meantime … there is a cloud cover creeping over the L.A. Basin; a scrim of burning silver, patterned like a ghost beach in the sky. You can see the ripples and chevrons of invisible waves up there, serenely tropical, threatening fire from heaven at a moment’s notice. It won’t happen down here – it strikes the heights when it comes – but I keep glancing at the mountains to the east, wondering if I am seeing the swelling shoulder of a thunderhead or the first plume of smoke.

I am still luckier than the East Coast folks now beginning to fall under the cloak of Hurricane Irene. And I realize my luck. To whichever one of you god types is responsible: Thank You! Thank you also for holding off on this until my dear agent Linn and her tiny dog Wiley moved out of Manhattan to Washington state. Please, please watch over the East Coast and have some mercy on those poor people. New York is not accustomed to storm surges, and a tornado warning in Massachusetts is surely a crime?

Now it’s back up to 95, and the humidity has dropped back down to 30 per cent. All this in the last 2 hours! We are not accustomed to these rapid changes here; we’re like deep water fish and we’ll explode if the pressures change too fast. Luckily, I finished proof-reading Ancient Rockets yestreday; if I had to do it today, I think my head would pop. I’m off to eat a giant fudgesickle and watch the news nervously, praying we won’t burn and the East Coast won’t drown. In between, may the Madrid Fault system sleep sound and not go off again!

How soon, I wonder (now that the East Coast is getting quakes) before the Pacific hurricanes start reaching us here in California? Then we’ll all be equal, from sea to shining sea.

Wow.

Kage Baker actually read the Bible. Usually the King James Version – it was her favourite, because she liked the poetry of the translation.

However,  sometimes the beauty of the lines interfered with their meaning, in that the translations are not too precise. Perhaps the best known is “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The word actually used (“chasaph”) apparently means something more like “poisoner”; specifically, a poisoner of wells – which in a desert land is pretty serious. Unfortunately, this translation has led lots of people, including that Bible’s eponymous patron, James the 1st and 6th, to persecute a lot of people for witchcraft and blame the Bible for the nasty habit.

Words matter.

Sometimes, though, the translations in the King James Version are just plain fascinating. Did you know weasels are treff? According to the KJV, they are. But some scholars think the word should have been translated as “moles” – and, when Kage researched it, she did find that there is only one weasel native to the area: the Least Weasel. It’s a miniscule beastie and she couldn’t believe the little thing was worth eating anyway – but she couldn’t imagine anyone needing to be forbidden to eat them. Still, it was her favourite of the dietary rules.

Do Not Eat Me - It's The Law

Of course, the Least Weasel also has a bacula – the  Mustelidae are not among those mammals who lack them, unlike human beings – which gives us a nice segue into our previous topic. Or into accidentally offending people with Bible translation oddities; which I do hope I am not doing. I don’t invent these things, I just report them …

Most of you, Dear Readers, are probably  familiar with the Bible story that Eve was created by the Lord God out of Adam’s rib. In fact, Christian scholars – who were deep into theology long before topics like medicine and anatomy – habitually believed that men did have one less rib than women; few of them ever had a clear look at the originals to count them, after all, and once they did, there some pretty fancy footwork to explain the anomaly.

In our high school biology classes, there hung a skeleton, for display purposes. It was vandalized on a regular basis with fancy lingerie, phoney cigars, cigarettes and doobies, fake fingernails, sunglasses. Our exemplary biology teacher, Sister Marsha, would ask at the beginning of each year if anyone could guess what gender the bones had been. It was then an annual event for some devout and/or dim student to raise her hand and respond that it was female, as it had the same number of ribs on each side. That gave the very logical Sister M. the chance to  get all that Adam’s-rib nonsense out of the way right at the beginning. I think she introduced several years’ worth of Catholic maidens to the idea of secular scepticism when she explained that the Bible was not an anatomy text … although not everyone believed her.

Those young ladies had real problems with the Krebs cycle and evolution later on.

If only Sister Marsha had seen this explanation: http://tinyurl.com/3n52c97

It’s a translation problem again. The word used in the original is “tzela”. This can be translated as “rib” but doesn’t ordinarily mean a rib like the bones in your chest. It means a structural rib, an architectural rib, a supporting column … as I said, humans had undoubtedly noticed that most male animals had the things. (Especially if they were hunting Least Weasels with enough frequency to get them on the treff  list.) But humans don’t. The two ladies referenced in the link above think the original story of Adam’s rib may be been an origin myth designed to explain this lack in human males – certainly, the missing bacula would have had considerably more reproductive panache than a mere costal rib.

Whether or not this was intended to be serious or tongue in cheek, the words do mean what they say they mean – and what they don’t. This broadens the world. It widens our outlook! It might even explain a story that never made sense, one that has bothered theologians for 2,000 years. And I think it’s hilarious, besides.

I bet the Least Weasel is snickering, too.

Kage Baker occasionally made errors in her writing. Her grasp of grammar was phenomenal, by modern standards, and she competently used punctuation marks that are becoming extinct. But even she, maven of dialect and relict word-play that she was, could slip up.

She even made spelling errors on occasion. I clearly recall every one the 11 times that happened in a manuscript, too.

I always expected – and dreaded – that the first time she got a proof-reader’s notes an epic tantrum would result. This did not happen. Kage would double check each change or objection, weigh its merits, and either politely disagree, or make the appropriate change. She was utterly calm and professional in her reactions; and if there were outraged comments made around our kitchen table – well, only Harry and I know. All the editor saw was the courteous instruction “Stet”.

The only time she ever got incensed was one editor who objected to a character being able to look up and see the Milky Way from the surface of the Earth: because (he said) Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy. Which is true, but the rest of our home galaxy is nonetheless visible. He had evidently been raised in a Skinner box. Kage declined to alter the facts of galactic placement and optics, and left the Milky Way visible.

Today, I am engaged in proof-reading for the up-and-coming Ancient Rockets, which of necessity will somewhat truncate this entry. There are no real spelling errors, just a few explanations. Most of the grammar changes are just to align Kage’s free and easy essays with Tachyon’s house rules; Kage wasn’t thinking of publication when she wrote these essays. Some of her more convoluted references need to be explained –  yes, slavey is a real word – but all in all the task is easy, if lengthy.

To which end, I must return. As is the natural law of all publishing, the manuscript is due back to the publisher within a day or two. They always are, no matter how much time has been allocated to the process. There must be something like Maxwell’s Demon, regulating the movement of manuscripts between editors and authors with unseen purpose …

So, time for another cup of coffee and back to the proofing! It’s all for you, Dear Readers, it really is.

Kage Baker used to say (quoting from Home To You) “It’s tired and I’m getting late.”

She listened to KPFK a lot in the 60’s and 70’s, especially late at night: they habitually broadcast from alternate universes, and Kage remembered everything she heard. The Firesign Theatre resurfaced a large proportion of her cerebellum, I believe,  regularly assisted by the Gas Company Concerts and the late-night voice of host Melvin Cross …

At least, to judge by the letters I got during my time at UC Irvine. I spent the first year in all my life living away from home there.  Kage sent daily excerpts, from a point where a space-time portal had evidently been installed in her tower. It had always been rather weird up there, but it got a lot weirder the year I was gone. Or so Kage reported it, sending me tales of daily phantasmagoria that left me dreadfully homesick.

She wrote them at night, and when the stars paled toward dawn would creep down and put the letters on the mantlepiece to be mailed by whoever went out first in the morning. I got the fat, wax-sealed and pen-and-ink sketch decorated envelopes on a daily basis, mostly – sometimes the USPS would screw up and I’d miss a day, then get two or three at once. Sometimes Kage would have more to say than she’d thought she would (especially when she was sending me chapters of stories) and I’d get an extra.

(They were so odd-looking that my roommates asked wistfully if I was getting drugs from home. No, but I got fruitcake! I love fruitcake. No one else wanted any, though; which was handy because it was what I mostly lived on that year.)

And sometimes Kage would run right out of time, energy, supplies or inspiration (I did get letters in crayon … also home-made envelopes) and I’d get the Peter Rowan quote noted above. With a list of amusing oddities she had compiled from real life, in the temporary paucity of her own imagination. This, for example, was where she first attempted to convince me that raw potatoes caused tularemia … one of my other favourites was her translation, into American vernacular, of various librettos from lesser-known operas in her treasured The Victor Book of Operas. Gilda the Goat Girl was especially poignant.

And this is the state I am in today, sunk in ennui and utterly without creative energy. I’ve eaten most of a box of Turkish Delight (rose flavoured), and the only result is that I am out of Turkish Delight. The calendar says it’s Wednesday, but it lies – this is one of those weeks where Monday is being endlessly replicated. I suspect my Kit Kat Klock is sneering at me when I look away from it – however, one’s family starts to worry if one sits there staring belligerently at the Kit Kat Klock in order to catch it out …

I have some weirdnesses to share with you, though, if any of you Dear Readers wants a giggle.

The yeast that created lager 600 years in ago in Bavaria has been shown to be derived from a fungus in Patagonia. It favours beech trees. How it got from Patagonia to Bavaria 600 years ago, and why anyone thought to toss it into their brewing, are questions yet unanswered. But if you are a fan of cold-brewed sour blonde beers, you can thank Saccharomyces eubayanus for the stuff.

The Washington Monument might be tilting as a result of the 5.8 quake in Virginia this morning. The police are watching it, presumably to see if it tilts right or left.

Scotland has a program releasing endangered Sea Eagles back into the wild; they are now attacking sheep, geese and a provost of Perth Cathedral. The provost would like them returned to extinction, please.

China is having a sudden plague of narcolepsy.

There. Peculiar things to ponder on this hot, muggy, slow day. I am going to emulate Kage, and go listen to music and read some Darwin. He always perks me right up.

Kage Baker grew up reading Ray Bradbury. Momma loved his stuff, and anything Momma liked, she handed (like, at gunpoint) to everyone else she liked. So, for the readers in the family, which was mostly the girls, Ray Bradbury was mandatory.

Kage felt this was a little wasted because Mr. Bradbury’s stories are very boy-centric. That mattered a lot more when we were 12 and 13 years old. Nonetheless, she loved the fantasy stories in particular, and the evocation of a special kind of Americana that was Mr. Bradbury’s province of excellence. The October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes were among Kage’s favourite mood pieces.

What she didn’t think was that Ray Bradbury wrote science fiction.

This is, of course, not the standard view; it’s almost heretical, in fact. Kage herself eventually came to detest the fanboy attitude that the only science fiction was “hard” – about machines, devoid of feelings, relationships or characterization; that it was all rocket ships and ray guns. Once she was actually writing science fiction, her views changed spectacularly. Before then, though …

“Ray Bradbury is supposed to be a science fiction writer?” she said to me one afternoon over diverse books.

“Yes, of course,” said I. I read all his stuff avidly.

“He can’t be. I don’t like science fiction,” said Kage, while the Weasel of Irony romped unseen about her feet.

“Of course he writes science fiction! What about all the Mars stories? What about “The Veldt”? “There Will Come Soft Rains”? Farenheit 451, for heaven’s sake!”

“Never read those,” she said stubbornly. “I don’t like science fiction. He writes fantasy.”

Aaaargh.

However … left to her own devices, Kage could change her mind. No one could do it for or to her, but given time and resource materials, even Kage could finally admit to change. When she began to get complaints that her own stories were not hard enough science fiction, she sat down and resolutely began to research just what the hell “hard science fiction” actually was … and as part of that, she finally sat down and read all those Ray Bradbury stories she had eschewed before.

She was sorry Momma had died before Kage could admit her error. But that was all right, really, because nothing ever convinced Momma she wasn’t right, either.

She discovered the Martians, with their eyes like golden coins and their lost lives drifting down the dreams of vanished canals. She discovered the carnivorous Playroom, and the ashen silhoette of a child with a ball etched into a crumbling wall. She discovered that the line between fantasy and science fiction can be very narrow indeed – and that if a writer lets their audience define it for them, their writing will be crippled.

You have to listen to what your readers want, but if you try to please them all, what you write will be populist dreck.  A writer needs to write what they will, and let the audience apply the labels. Most of the labels will be pointless anyway, no matter who applies them; so why worry? Write what’s in your head. If you write it well enough, someone will read it and get the point, even if they “don’t like science fiction.”

Kage got letters, after a while, from people telling her they didn’t like science fiction: or fantasy, or time travel stories, or romances – whatever they thought they were getting when they picked up one of her books. But, they would then say, they liked hers. Kage would roll her eyes ruefully and say, “Sorry, Mr. B.! I didn’t know!”

Today, Ray Bradbury is 91 years old. Which is nonsense, of course – he can’t be 91 years old! He’s running on a lawn under the summer stars, 12 years old, eyes a-stretch for wonder. He’s drifting down the Grand Canal, watching the filigree towers reflected in the black, black water. He’s immortal.

Happy Birthday, Mr. B.