Under The Veil

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker loved classical California June weather: “June Gloom”, as the non-appreciative call it, or “May Grey”, in years when it doesn’t cooperate with weather tropes.

Historically, May and June are overcast. The sea and the air get amourous and confused, and the interface between them becomes entwined: for 50 miles inland, it’s not so much the lowest layer of the air as the highest layer of the ocean. Everything smells of salt and sage, and the sun only appears in time to set – vague and pale, long drifting stripes of lavender and orchid and silver painting the West. Most people complain about it. But Kage adored it.

California, you see, is essentially just one long coast – 800 miles of it, with an average width inland of only about 250 miles. Fog, clouds, muscular mist and wind-whipped sea foam can therefore spread in from the omnipresent Pacific and envelope entire cities. And it’s most likely to happen in May and June, when the damp spring sharpens into arid summer.

The last few years, though, we have been having weather out of Monty Python & The Holy Grail*. Or maybe A Midsummer Night’s Dream**. No rain in winter, no rain in spring, heat waves beginning in April and extending to September, when we segue into a re-enactment of the surface of the Sun. The cool mornings and the soft evenings of May and June have been bright and dry and glaring; and over the last two panting years even the people who most scorned the annual foggy season have begun to mourn the lack of that sweet marine layer.

But this year, it has come back! We had some insane heat waves in March and April, times of year when we usually are in greater danger of frost; but they relented and went away! And over the last 5 weeks, the weather has been …. normal. Which is now so peculiar that people  are anxiously wondering what it means, and what ghastly weather anomaly is coming next.

(And, actually, a humdinger of an El Nino season is forecast for Autumn and Winter. There’s an enormous sink of warm water up in the Arctic Ocean, aptly named The Blob by the NOAA, and apparently we now have an 85% chance of an aerial river debouching over Los Angeles this winter. We’ll drown, but we won’t be thirsty!)

So, those with short memories or new to LA are worried about the foggy foggy dew. The natives are mostly delighted – we’ve even had rain, here and there, producing effects ranging from floods to merely damp lawns (most of which are already dead anyway). This is the way it was when we were kids, and the return to what I knew as a child is always a delight these days.

The summer is supposed to start like this – dim cool mornings, early plums, bare feet leaving marks in the sparkling grass. The cat comes indoors doing indignant dressage, lifting high-trotting wet paws with disdain and disapproval; the Corgi is wet to his shoulders after a morning run in the garden. Through mid-afternoon you can see the mist moving in the street like a phantom army, lower than the roofs and bringing all the perfumes of the sea and the golden hills … when Kage and I were girls, we’d fill our pockets with plums, apricots and Corn-Nuts, and go wandering through the Hollywood Hills to eat our breakfasts in the ruins of old stars’ mansions …

When we were grown women, living in Pismo Beach, this weather was like being in  a soap bubble. Kage would sit at her desk, staring off through the refractive walls of cell on drifting cell of fog: everything between our window and the sea was rimmed in a nimbus of rainbows. And she’d exude content like a cat on a warm hearth; and then she’d sigh, and turn away, and begin to write her way through the thinning veil into some new world.

Gloom? Grey? No way, Dear Readers. The walls between the worlds can be just that thin, the light of other lands coming soft through the sea-foam piling on the hills. It’s a magic veil that gives sight as it falls across the eyes, a lens that sharpens vision as it thickens in the air.

Shazam.

 

 

 

* … Winter changed into spring, spring changed into summer, summer changed back into winter, and winter gave spring and summer a miss and went straight on into autumn …

** … the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs, which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drownèd field,
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.
The nine-men’s-morris is filled up with mud …

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Bowl

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker was not an especially social person.

She didn’t like crowds. She didn’t like noise. She didn’t like competing for space, or attention, or a waiter’s notice. I don’t think there was a single activity that she liked better when it had 20 participants than when it had 2.

But she loved summer concerts in the Hollywood Bowl. Classics, mind you – symphonies. Marches. Etudes and concerti and variations upon themes of beauty. Opera.

We went to hundreds of summer concerts at the Hollywood Bowl; most of our lives, we lived literally up or down the block from the place and wandered in whenever we felt like it to stay the evening. We were habitues of the nose-bleed sections, where the time-silvered cedar benches stood under the looming oak and eucalyptus trees lining the top edge of the amphitheatre. (They were replaced in 2014, with new cedar benches, which will eventually age to the same glowing silver of our girlhood. The old ones will be re-milled, and used in parks all over Los Angeles.)

Several sets of our initials went with those old benches.  Some, those done by Kage, were carved in Celtic uncials or glyphs of her own devising; usually with my pocket knife, but also with corkscrews, keys and at least one brass pen nib. Mind you, they were the same initials – KB – but linked with different partners … Even in that iconic activity, she preferred a small group. It’s why, to my certain knowledge, there were only 2 other sets of initials carved with hers.

Kage preferred the nights when the audience there was small, anyway. Some nights, there was just no hope – the 4th of July and the Tchaikovsky Spectacular were always veritable termite mounds of people – but much of the time we enjoyed lofty isolation and a unimpeded view, like a pair of Ladies of Shallot in their tower. It was marvellous. And though we were occasionally joined by racoons or deer or music-lovers even poorer than us sneaking in over the back fence … it was usually a private pleasaunce up there.

The best one was in 1973. A performance of La Boheme was scheduled – only semi-staged, which meant basically 4 singers in evening dress  gesticulating in an imaginary Paris; but that was fine with us. Kage was 21 and I was 20 – regardless of which, we were well-supplied with what is usually politely called “rough red table wine” …. which was nice, as the night grew chill when the evening fog cleared away. The full moon shown down into a Bowl that was 3/4 empty, and all the wooden benches glowed like polished pewter. And into that nearly-empty amphitheatre, a rising young tenor named Luciano Pavarotti sang a divine Rudolpho. It was his Los Angeles debut, and only a few people were there, and we were among them.

Che gelida manina, sang the voice of a god. Our hands were indeed like ice, but our hearts were on fire.

It wouldn’t have been as miraculous if we had not been sitting in vestal isolation in the moonlight.

I need to go back to the Bowl this summer. Believe it or not, Dear Readers, I’ve been back in Los Angeles for 5 years and have yet to return to that temple of delight. It seemed too empty – but tonight I began to think of it, and how we loved it when there was almost no one there, and I realized the best memories had a small, small cast.

I can’t run up the stairs like the trespassing deer, as I used to – with a hot pizza box under one arm and a young man’s arm in the other, the wine stowed in Kage’s enormous woven twine purse as she towed her own inamorato up the cracked, slanting stairs. But I understand there are people movers most of the way up now, which is a grand thing.

There will be moonlight. The benches will look the same in the dark. And I think I may need to carve a few initials fresh again.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

June 10th, 2015

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker would have been 63 years old today.

She wouldn’t have liked it much, I think. Getting old was not turning out to be as amusing as she had hoped. But time gives us all better perspectives, and she’d have made the best of it. If she had survived the cancer that killed her – as we expected her to – she would have shrugged today, grinned and said, “I’m as old as dirt, but it beats the alternative!”  And raised a courteous toast to Death, whom she had managed to cheat.

On the other hand, at 63 Kage would have at last qualified for Social Security. We’d carefully calculated our likely benefits, based on those helpful statements the Gummint sends each year; and being on Social Security would have given Kage a guaranteed income better than most years as a free-lance writer. We’d been poor for so long that living on a fixed income was going to be a piece of cake … and she would still have been writing. Easy Street, man. Or at least, Easier Street.

Also, the fight with the cancer would have left her lean and elegantly skeletal – she had great bones, to my eternal envy – I don’t have any apparent  bones, while Kage had cheekbones, and a jaw, and hands like Elizabeth Tudor. By this time her hair would have grown back probably as long as her knees, and be silver-gilt with a sprinkling of garnet: her hair was becoming inhumanly coloured with age, as redheads usually do.

There might have been a third Nell Gwynne novel; certainly a few more stories. There would have been a sequel to The Hotel Under The Sand. There would have a sequel to The Empress of Mars, and in fact that is actually in progress … there would have been more Company stories. And by now, Kage would probably have been deep into the decades-in-the-planning autobiographies of both James Hook and John Silver, whom she loved more than any other sailors on life.

I can’t hope to write those last two. There’s not enough salt water in my blood. I will always be under the oak trees halfway up a sea-facing canyon, watching Kage wade breast-high into the silver, westering waves.

But my goal of making sure her name is not forgotten is succeeding.  There are over 1,000 of these blogs, Dear Readers, each one – no matter how peculiar and off-center its topic – beginning with her name fan-fared into the Void. There are all of you and all the others who write to me every month, remembering her. Today, the good folk at Tachyon Publications sent out a lovely In Memorium for Kage, which can be found here: http://tachyonpub.tumblr.com/post/121191933266/the-acclaimed-creator-of-the-company-time-travel

And in Wikipedia, under the heading for June 10th, her birthday is memorialized – right there with princes and princesses of England, Greece and Russia; actors, singers, artists, politicians and other not-quite-respectable geniuses. I don’t know who appended her name to the august roles of Wikipedia, only that it wasn’t me. And that the finding of it there makes me happy.

I couldn’t sleep at all last night, relentlessly awake until the dawn came, going over in my mind all the birthday rituals – wrapping gifts the night before, and putting them out to torment her in the evening (No Peeking!). Sneaking them into her bedroom in the dark, so she’d see them as soon as she woke up. Dinner at The Brambles in Cambria, or Budu’s Kitchen overlooking the Pacific south of San Simeon, or El Galleon in Avalon. Toasting the future with musical comedy cocktails.

I really miss you, Kage.

So here’s to you, kiddo. Happy birthday.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Don’t Call Us and We Won’t Call You, Either

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker loathed interruptions to her writing.

A knock at the door, excessive traffic noise, loudspeakers from the Pier 2 blocks away – they sent her mad. Even being told a meal was ready or being asked if she wanted a fresh Coke could be too much; it was better to wait until she had to go to the bathroom or asked for something, than to try to anticipate her needs. At least, if it meant talking out loud. Sometimes I slipped her notes.

The mere presence of the phone in the house was often more than she could bear. But she never felt that it was safe to unplug it, either – something might happen to a family member, or an editor might call.  Or the Diablo Nuclear Plant up the coast might finally produce enough energy to achieve a melt-down; and we’d never find out if the phone was unplugged.

I could put forth several arguments against that last one, but it was no use. Besides, it was a fact that a telephone tree was precisely how the local NRC office planned on telling the residents if Diablo developed indigestion. (Then we’d get to use the potassium iodide pills they’d sent to all of us in a mass mailing: lots and lots of tiny bottles in manila envelopes, addressed to “Occupant” and stamped “Warning: Radioactive Information”. Very surreal.) And her other worries did occasionally occur, so she wouldn’t sanction ditching the land line. However, even with an answering machine, Caller ID and me to take the calls, the mere existence of the phone was enough to give her the heebie-jeebies from across the room.

Kage died before unsolicited and unstoppable nuisance calls became so ubiquitous, too. Back when the DO NOT CALL list was barely needed, and actually worked … not for her the constant robo-calls and political recordings, the boiler-room callers pretending to be a local handyman or someone’s best friend from high school. It’s weird to realize that even a mere 5 years ago, I didn’t have to worry about answering the phone 6 times a day to hear some recorded geezer wheeze “Hello, seniors!” in my ear with fake bon homme.

And while Kage had a cell phone, she tried hard not to admit it existed. She only carried it on the rare occasions that she travelled without me. It usually sat in its charger port, turned off; the only reason she put up with it, I suspect, was because of its cool black leather case with the Jolly Roger picked out in rhinestones. Kage was dedicated to cool accessories.

She never had a Smart Phone, although she admired our friends’ phones. She knew exactly which apps she wanted me to get when I finally acquired one: which, she was serenely sure, was the closest a Smart Phone would ever get to her. She was right, too. I got mine a few months after she died, and installed the apps she had thought would be useful. Except for the Kindle app, which Kage never anticipated, all her suggestions were useful and most have become indispensable. Especially the maps and the spirit level. The EM Ghost Finder has been problematical, though – it seems to attract EM anomalies rather than track them, and they always appear behind my right shoulder. Either the thing is producing the EM displays, or my shoulder blade, like the Mikado’s Daughter-in-law Elect’s, emits an irresistible attraction.

It would all have amused Kage incredibly. And since she would have been in charge of the thing while driving – something on which she insisted even when it was legal to use your phone while behind the wheel – I know she would have gotten good at it, too.

But not at home. I’d have had to disable all the sound functions on all my techno toys, notepads, phones and E-readers, lest the squeaks and beeps of their activity could have interrupted Kage’s writing. Heck, she got irate when the desk top sent her notifications of programs needing updates or security warnings. Even her own computer had to be silent when she worked.

Oddly enough, noise doesn’t bother me much. The music of the city still charms me. Maybe because I live in a naturally noisier house than ours was – more family, more pets; not only Harry, but his cat and dog minions stampeding around. (Never mind the claws – cats have retractable hooves.) There’s a grammar school 3 houses away, which seems to regularly re-enact the French Revolution. We’re under a main LAPD helicopter migration route, and more or less enclosed in the routes of 4 freeways – which develop infarcts, aneurysms and enormous collisions on a daily basis. There are train tracks running 24-7 only 3 blocks away. Coyotes howl, dogs bark, roosters crow, ravens gronk, mockingbirds sing exquisitely but also mimic everything else. It’s a rowdy place, my home town.

Kage lived with it pretty happily for 41 years herself. But once she ran away to live in oak groves and sea canyons and coves of white sand – well, her requirements changed. But the memories of all that urban music stayed in her head. Look at stories like “The Angel In The Darkness”, or her descriptions of cities. She loved the noise, or at least its idealized memory.

As long as it came when called – and only then! – and didn’t interrupt her.

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Frangibility

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker considered herself a rational person.

It had nothing to do with sanity, or intelligence, or whether or not one can control and/or access one’s emotions. She was just sure that even her deepest impulses and decisions were firmly rooted in logic. She considered herself an observer of rational rules of thought. Cause and effect, Occam’s Razor, reasonable doubt, reproducible effects – all, Kage believed, were underpinnings of her thought processes.

Anyone who knew her probably thought this was hilariously funny. I certainly did …

But Kage was, by nature, a tool user; and by her own lights, tool-using was a primary mark of rationality. Therefore, she was a rational person. Never mind that she couldn’t tolerate a hat on a bed, spilled salt, an epithet spoken  in a theatre, a dream told before breakfast: she considered certain superstitions rational as well; or, at least, actions in the service of rationality – because, she said, indulging them cleared her mind of panic by making her feel safer, and therefore contributed to a more controlled emotional atmosphere.

Kage trusted acts of faith. According to her, faith was also rational: it was an illustration of deep thought. Unconscious logic made leaps, and thus inaccessible ratiocination produced  conclusions apparently unsupported by evidence – but that apparent lack of evidence was an artifact of the unconscious process, and so faith was a rational response.

She said she relied heavily on her subconscious. She trusted it implicitly, too. No one else’s, mind you! But she had a perfect relationship with her own unconscious processes.

I think her belief was a reflex based on suspicion of other people’s thought processes. Kage expected consistency of the Universe, and that included the behaviour of its denizens. When she didn’t get that consistency, she was frightened and repulsed. She herself was  inhumanly firm in her convictions – the ability of most people to perjure, deceive and cheat themselves and others hurt her terribly. And since it was something she did not do, and something she did not understand, it was labelled IRRATIONAL in her mental files and her own behaviour became, by default, RATIONAL.

Kage didn’t believe in situational ethics. Nor in subjectivity. Experimental bias was foreign to her. It wasn’t rooted in rationality; it was bedrock deep – and bedrock hard – personal morality. It meant she was sometimes narrow-minded, and always stubborn, and changed her mind as swiftly as granite grows into mountains. But it also meant that when she did change her mind, it was a complete and clear-eyed change.

I’ve never understood how she was able to illustrate so much about human nature in her writing. Kage didn’t understand individual people very well. Not face to face, anyway. She watched them, she studied them, she compared their diverse actions and reactions to all the other people she observed: and she wrote down what she saw. Her conclusions were few, and not delivered as Revealed Truth – she had a horror of authority or proselytizing, and those character traits were almost always assigned to her villains. She just wrote about people as she saw them, and she saw them pretty clearly.

She was honest to a fault: as in, Yeah, those pants do make your ass look big. And when her own opinions were refuted by her research, she dumped them without hesitation. Though it wasn’t facts that affected her so much as her reactions to them – it wasn’t tests and studies that made Kage believe sentience did not reside solely with Homo sapiens. It was watching elephants and whales when humans were not around, or looking into the eyes of a living ape.

When her characters proved her wrong, especially, she changed her mind. Her own adolescent fear of homosexuals disappeared in the clean white light of actually meeting some; as an adult, she wrote decisively that there just isn’t enough love around to make a fuss about who loves whom. She paired her characters up romantically with regard only to necessary plot development or aesthetics – who looked best together? She was very big on aesthetics …

Lots of fans wrote to her, confidently assured that Lord Ermenwyr was gay, and happy about it. That delighted Kage, although she maintained that Lord E. simply didn’t restrict himself in any way … And Lewis – possibly her most popular character ever – has been widely assumed to be gay. Kage said she was never sure, but she sort of thought he was in love with Love Itself, and so was  a much deeper personality than mere gender preference.

Kage was terrified by mental illness or anomalies as a young woman: undoubtedly because she had a very strange mind herself, and was constantly frightened by it. In her 30’s, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s. It calmed her fears, gave her confidence, and turned her into a public advocate of what she called “autiform disorders.” She spoke about it at conventions, and wrote it into two major characters, in Empress of Mars and “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park”.

She couldn’t have written any of this when she was 20. The people she wrote about would have scared her. But when they insisted on being themselves anyway, she changed her mind and wrote them as they demanded. Rational? I don’t think so – but Kage did. She considered it an ultimate rationality to  bend to the characters’ will, instead of warping them to her own.

It was once believed that glass was a supercooled liquid, a belief inspired by the way some old window glass seems to be melting slowly towards the bottom of the pane. Kage loved the idea of that glacial flow, the slow stubborn heat of the glass still melting it even in the cold air. But it’s not so – glass is an amorphous solid, not a liquid, and the melting trick is an illusion caused by antique methods of rolling hot glass flat. The amorphous solid does still flow: but so slowly that the Universe will run out of Time before the windows in Notre Dame actually manage to drip out of their stone frames. However … if they stand long enough, they’ll do it. They really will.

An amorphous solid, changing somewhere outside the boundaries of rationality. And at the same time, more solid than the heartbeat of the Universe.

That was Kage.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

OCD In Progress

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker was convinced that every one has a touch of obsessive compulsive urges. She was probably correct, too – that kind of intense focus is sought after in most arts and disciplines, and carefully cultivated. It’s what some people call fire in the belly, or giving 110% or other cheer leading aphorisms.

It’s a normal part of the human spectrum of behaviour – it only becomes a problem when the urge to engage in obsession matters more than the satisfying of the obsessive urge alone. Kage understood that distinction well – she knew that she actually enjoyed the manic energy of the obsession for itself, but that giving in to it was what turned it into a disorder. So she learned to channel and control it. It was one of the wellsprings of her creative energy.

To balance that tightly controlled urge, she would let it completely loose at intervals. She’d spend a weekend watching old classic cartoons (preferably from Fleischer or Avery) , or one of the peculiar movies that informed her special inner landscape: The Wrong Box. Treasure Island (with good old Bobby Newton). The Children’s Blue Bird. Fantasia. She’d play all the Monkey Island games, including the final quintet from Steam; or Grim Fandango.

I seldom do any of that. But I got back from the wonderful time at BayCon with one huge disappointment – my new Buke did not perform satisfactorily under actual writing conditions. I had gone with a Kindle Fire tablet, but you know what? Amazon’s wretched proprietory software meant all sorts of hassles with non-Amazon programs. I couldn’t load Firefox. I couldn’t load Open Office – worse, I could load it, but only as a read-only format downloaded from Amazon. So in order to actually write, I would have had to purchase their version of Open Office – a program available for free on a normal tablet. And then, when I got home, my desktop monitor promptly kicked the ol’ jam jar – as Kage was fond of saying.

Much screaming and howling ensued. I needed a release!  I now have a new monitor; and Amazon is refunding my purchase of the Fire Tablet without argument. I shall go for something more actually Buke-like, whereon I can actually, easily, vitally, WRITE.

In the meantime …. I am indulging my own, infrequent form of OCD: catching up on a television show I’ve only caught glimpses of over the years, while going in and out of Kimberly’s living room. I’m binge-watching Bones. All 9 seasons of it.

Things will be normal in a day or two. In the meantime, OCD indulgence is soothing me with its sweet, sweet releases of serotonin and oxytocin, and other popular adrenergic agonists.

They speak my language at the Jeffersonian …

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

BayCon: Dispatch 5

Posted on May 24, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker really liked moderating panels. It gave her a sense of power, or so she always claimed. I think it actually just gave her a method to insist upon order, clarity, and sticking to the topic – things that, when neglected, always made her insane.

Some folks like to moderate because  it gives them a bully pulpit. Some like it because they feel it means that don’t have to do any work – just let the panelists carry on. Some folks are inveterate lecturers, or friends of the Con Committee, or own the only working microphone …

I, personally, don’t like to do it at all. I am rarely inhibited about speaking, and so don’t usually need help in contributing to the flow of conversation – and I hate being pointed out like a child in school, with someone else deciding it’s my turn. I don’t like running the topic. It’s usually an exercise in cat herding, and I get to do quite enough of that in real life. Authors are hard to control, and so are fans – but actors, freaking actors, are the very most difficult …

Nonetheless, it’s my turn in the barrel. I am off in a few minutes to moderate a panel on “The Last 50 Years of Exploration on Mars”. I have a sinking feeling that I was chosen as moderator because Kage and I made fun of the problems NASA has had with metric measurements – that contributed to the loss of at the Climate Orbiter satellite, and led  directly to Kage writing The Empress of Mars …

Really though, the reasons we chose that incident was because it was so out of character for NASA – which has otherwise had a splendid track record with Mars missions. And so many,many missions to Mars have come to grief, far more than any other catgory of space exploration. It makes the loss of one to mis-measurement and poor translation pretty funny.

Still – something eats Mars missions. It cannot be denied. We’ve sent out a lot of them from Earth in the last 50 years; inordinate numbe rs of them have crashed, missed the entire planet, landed and vanished, landed and gone inexplicably silent … it’s peculiar. Even more of them have never even made it out of Earth orbit. The Russians alone have launched over 2 dozen missions – only 2 even made it to Mars orbit, and they failed in situ. Very strange, tovarisch.

Makes you take H.G. Wells a little more seriously. Maybe. I’ll let you all know later, when the panel is over.

**************

Well. Here I am on my afternoon break, between the Last 50 Years on Mars, and the Next 50 Years. And no, noone at the last panel was worried about H. G Wells. They were a very serious audience, sober and respectable people; my attempts at humour fell pretty flat. My antic moods are not for all markets … also, we were down a panelist, and the 2 of us who made it were both female. I think that offended some of the males in the audience; because, you know, GIRLS.  Nonetheless, it was a pretty good panel, we were thanked by several members of the audience, and I am done moderating.

The next panel will be more fun. “The Next 50 Years Expoloration On Mars” ought to bring the alien conspiracy folks out. I kind of hope so – they can be fun.

*Discontinuity*

Me and the entourage are now safely back in our room, full of a nice dinner and self-satisfaction at a Con well-managed. By us, anyway – due to circumstances beyond all control, the whole circus had to drop the poles and clear out tonight. All the Sunday evening goodies and the Monday panels were re-scheduled or lost … but it was not BayCon’s faujlt, not really, and the Con was a good one.

My last panel was scary, but exciting. “The Next 50 Years of Research  On Mars” was moderated by a gentleman who is both a writer and an astronomer; another panelist was an areospace engineer, and a third was not only an engineer but he works for Elon Musk! I am a mere writer who is interested in Mars, and likes to research her stories as accuratgely as possible. I felt myself definitely out-ranked and out-classed.

However, all 3 of the gentlemen were charming and courteous, and did not scorn me for my lesser database and goals. They outclassed most of the audience, too … and I was able to pull my own weight on the questions and discussions. (I did my research on the topic, too, and was ever so glad I had.) Most of the questions were good, and even when the face on Mars and Richard Hoagland were brought up – as they inevitably were – things were interesting and informative.

Turned out one of my fellow panelists has met the bizarre Mr. Hoagland, and his frank opinion of the man was hilarious. I hope I do not offend any of you, Dear Readers, by expressing my opinion – which is that Richard Hoagland is a raving nutcase – but,  you know, he just is.

There are legitimate mysteries on and about Mars, that need to be looked at. Why is the electromagnetic field patchy? What did blow the atmosphere off? What causes the odd flashes of light seen in the Edom Promontorium? When can we get a good look through the “skylight” of a lava tube? Will the Russians ever get a lander to Mars?

These are weirder than anything on Earth; they are weirder than anything we have invented or speculated about Mars. We don’t need spurious faces or pyramids or jelly doughtnuts (check it out on space.com) and other examples of rampant pariedolia to inspire us with the mystery of Mars. It’s got more than enough on its own.

So I quite enjoyed my panels today, and my stint at BayCon in general. Neassa and Michael have taken excellent care of me – retrieved my cane and my room key, got me to my panels on time, read the maps for me. Tonight we are all having a quiet evening to rfegenerate our everyday brains, and tomorrow we will go on our ways to more mundane locales.

For a while, anyway … next week, Neassa is helping out at a Dulcimer Festival. Michael and I haved yet to make it back to Los Angreles. And In August is the WorldCon in Spokane, whence I am bound to carp from the mezzanine.

Just no end of fun in the life of a writer!

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

BayCon: Dispatch 4

Posted on May 23, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker loved staying in hotels. I think is was actually why she consented to go to conventions at all – the stress of being on panels and meeting people was assauged by the availability of comfortable bars and restaurants with two forks at a setting. Two forks was one of her criteria for elegence.

I must admit, spending a few days in a nice hotel is a wonderful vacation. Even if one must at intervals venture out and earn one’s keep on a panel – the conference rooms are nice, the company could not be more amiable, and one gets to perform a little. Having a pre-selected and interested audience was something not even Kage could resist.

My first panel today was on “First Contact and Politics”. It was very interesting, and quite surprised me. First: almost universally, examples of First Contact scenariae were taken from genre media – mostly televisiion shows, like Star Trek and Stargate. And most others came from science fiction stories. Personally, though I am well-read in science fiction, I prefer to contemplate First Contact in terms of actual history.

While we have no idea of what the aliens will be like when we finally encounter them, the chance of their being anything humanoid is low; let alone some breed of humanoid with whom we can share proteins and sex … we’ll be lucky if we can identify their sensory organs enough to read an expression.

Second, we won’t know until it is literally too late just what their First Contact habits are – but we have ample proof of what ours have been. And the human record of First Contact, on either side of the equation, is almost universally tragic. My own immediate ancestors include several kinds of Celt, and a soupcon of East Coast Amerindian – a veritable variety pack of subsumed and assimilated natives.

I personally feel that no government is competent to deal with aliens, and that in most cases we here on Earth are screwed. Nonetheless, it makes for an endlessly interesting subject of discussion – from the Keynsian economist to the Native American activist to the earnest Northern European  lady who felt that colonial rule was not all that bad … I think the human race should prepare for guerilla tactics and hard dealings and that most political stgructures will  collapse.

It’ll sure be interesting times.

Next up: “The Biology of Mythical Beasts”.  I can hardly wait – one of the panelists is the veterinarian student from yestreday’s discussion of “Animal Husbandry In Space”.  That young man has a fascinating vision.

Aaaaand … back in the room afte Mythological Beasts. What a riot! A panel of 8, an uninterested moderator, a crammed audience, and much hoisting of skirts to display frilly panties. Metaphorically speaking, anyway. The vet student has an extraordinarily constricted view of the animal kingdom, and I hope (for their sake) that all his future patients are already mythological. They will be soon, if not.

Nonetheless, it was fun, in a sleep-over party sort of way.  I mostly listened and gave focus, and did not try to steal the younger folks’ fun. I can be a nice old lady when I try. However, I was (once more) slightly horrified at how many references were drawn from popular visual media: cartoons. Pokemon. My Little Pony. Whatever happened to Bullfinch’s Mythology, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

*Discontinuity*

And the reading is done and behind me. It was my very first reading, Dear Readers – the first time I read out a portion of a story I have written and no one has heard. I think it went well. The audience outnumbered the panel (always to be desired) and I timed it just right. I gave them the opening to Marswife, right after the bomb in the Olympus Mons arethermal power plant goes off and takes out Mars II.

There were 3 of us, each asked to read a Mars-themed passage from a book or story. The other two authors were venerable pros, and quite good: but my story had the hardest science! One of them was writing about white-water rafting on a post-terraformed Mars, and aside from it’s being post-terraforming, it might as well have been set in Colorado. The other was a psychological thriller set on a returning Mars mission during a long slog home to Earth.

I was inordinately pleased with myself. I shall beg forgiveness for my boasting; but it was my first time, and it did go awfully well …

More fascinatingly odd people are everywhere, including lots of nuns and clerics; dog collars abound. So do real ones, but those are on the local space Goths. This year, faerie wings are worn by small girls only, apparently – accessorised with tiny glowing LED beads in the hair; a charming effect. Wonder Women are frequent. So are the Girl Ghost Busters, with their unlicensed particle accelerators on their backs. I have been embraced by affectionate Security guards crying “Mother!” – to the confusion of strangers – because you can’t take me hardly anywhere without encountering someone I have nurtured at Faire.

All is well. I have my Kindle and a bag of Whopper Malt Balls; Michael has Coke, and of course Neassa always has her emergency stash of chocolates in her bag. So we are set for the evening. Tomorrow: a panel on the last 50 years of Mars exploration. Another on the next 50 years. And bacon and eggs for breakfast.

Excelsior!

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

BayCon: Dispatch 3

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker was wont, at moments of extreme good fortune, to throw her head back and yell at the sky” “She’s ugly! Ugly!”

This was a reference both to classic Latin drama, and classic Hollywood comedy: Pseudolus The Slave  (by Plautus), and A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To The Forum (by a bunch of New York Comedy writers. And Plautus). It’s a way to deflect the wrath of the gods by denying that anything good has happened – you get a pretty girl, you yell at all-seeing Jove that the chick is actually ugly. Maybe he doesn’t notice she’s hot, and an eagle doesn’t drop a tortoise on your head.

This is my pedantic way of saying that I should not have boasted about my good hotel fortune last night. As of this morning, the Hyatt has now charged me three times (once via Rewards Points and twice via cash) for a double booking – I’ve so far paid over $300 for a room that doesn’t exist and that I wasn’t in last night. They are ever so sorry, and the refund will be processed in 3 or 4 days … mind you, the charge was applied in less than 12 freaking hours, but hey – that’s finance.

My bank account has been so bollixed up by duplicate charges, partial refunds and hysterical emails to and from me that I now cannnot access it. There’s never that much in it, anyway, but I had it all carefully budgeted for the mad social whirl of the Con. Sigh … Luckily, I have cash in my wallet, so I’ll eat for a while. If I run out of cash, my nephew gets to do the manly thing and pay his poor old Auntie’s way. So much for my showing my entourage a good time …

There’s a panel here on “How To Encourage The Next Generation of Science Fiction Writers”. I wish I was on it. I would suggest they be dropped naked into the wilderness, and have to come out alive and with both a finished manuscript and a contract from a bear to publish it. That would prepare them for the wild, indulgent life of a writer.

On the other hand … I get to discuss “Animal Husbandry In Space” this afternoon – a topic not only of exteme practical use, but fraught with vast comic potential, in my opinion. And my sister Kimberly has sent us up here with beautiful pins for me and my entourage – classic metal clock faces, with elegent numbers and no hands. Company badges! They are super cool.

*DISCONTINUITY*

And now it is evening; replete with a fine dinner, I am ensconced in my room with  my faithful entourage after a lovely afternoon and evening. The crowd was a little thin today, but nicely dressed – we saw many Whovians of various persuasions, including the ever-growing number of fans who choose to dress as a Tardis instead of a Time Lord … various members of military groups I did not recognize (but assume are space navies, due to their naval air but unidentifiable decorations); plus assorted Klingons, Browncoats, unspecified Victorian adventurers, a stuffed dog, a furry teddy bear, and Dr. Horrible. Also three ladies of my acquaintence in gloriously 1950’s-ish garb, who just came to see friends in the lobby and drink lethal-sounding cocktails. And the gentleman running tonight’s Casino, who has a stuffed monkey in his shirt pocket.

Pretty good bag for a quiet Friday at BayCon.

My afternooon panel on “Animal Husbandry In Space” was a lot of fun, though perhaps not for the Moderator. She tried heroically to keep us in line, but the panel was so bursting with ideas that we got away from her several times. Some fascinating ideas were aired – for example, does the immorality of eating meat mean  that building new ecosystems in space signals the need for a change to vat meat? To vegan diets? How do we deal with the desperate bacon addicts, the serious lack of fat and protien inherent in eating vegan, the lure of long pig in isolated space habitats bereft of beef and pork?

How do we care for animals in low or zero gravity? I favour the use of pygmy animals, for gravity sparseness as well as ease of stabling – cows, goats and horses all come in Fun Sizes. Conversely, rabbits are azvailable in sizes comparable to a human toddler, so you can aim at having a whole farmyard of edible animals no larger than, say, an average dog. Another panelist suggested magnetizing the hulls of space habitats and strapping magnets to animals’ feet. I think he was serious. But I couldn ‘t help imagining a solar flare producing en EMP that de-gausses your hull, fried your navigation system, and fills the air with floating goats …

I know he was serious, though, when he suggested that the genetic alteration of spiders to the size of hassocks would provide both meat and textiles. Never mind that 4/5 of your general population would wash out of the colony program with screaming hysterics at the idea that Bossy, Flossy and Co. now have 6 eyes, mandibles and 8 hairy legs – you’d get meat with no bones, and silk.

Making do with sheep would probably be more practical.

But lots of excellent ideas on aquaculture, hydroponics, and small animal breeding were also advanced, and a good time was had by all.  Eating octopus and rats was generally rejected on the grounds of sentience. Recipes for crickets, silk worms and guinea pigs were sharecd. The necessity of crop rotation was re-discovered from first principles – and while I doubt our space and extra-terrestrial colonies will fall so far behind that they will need to do the same, it’s nice to know that the young of our species can still figure this one out.

Tomorrow I am looking forward to “First Contact and Politics” and “The Biology of Mythical Creatures”. Plus more people watching. And maybe, in Kage’s honour, I will try the Wonder Woman Shot featured in the bar: Goldschlager, Blue Curacao and Grenadine.

But probably not. Some madness is just too far.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

BayCon 2015: Dispatch 2

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker liked to get to a Con a day before she was actually due, It minimized the frantic race to get your passes and schedule, find your room, discover what indispensable item you had forgotten 8 hours and 300 miles back. You could eat dinner and usually look forward to breakfast as well.

I think it’s a great system – the more so because I have an utter horror of being late. Kage sailed through appointments with a queenly disregard  for the strictures of mere mortal time; maybe it was the Operative viewpoint. She never deliberately arrived late and she hated inconveniencing people – but she moved in her own time, and whenever she got where she was going was, obviously, the right time to be there …

My job was to warp Time and Space so Kage’s internal schedule meshed with the world’s. She had some unique escapement in her clockwork that could be gently tricked with the proper techniques – like setting clocks ahead. And lying. It all worked somehow.

But getting to Cons a day early was always a good idea. It usually works out that you arrive in early evening anyway, so it’s really just a case of being settled in place before all the running around begins. One hears stories … of people whose reservations were handed off to someone else, people who slept in the Convention Center halls for lack of housing, people who raced off to a first panel without checking in and thus lost their rooms and ended up living in the Green Room for 4 days. Kage and I had our reservation vanish into the aether at a Boston WorldCon, and only got a bed for the first night because Linn-the-agent called the hotel and frightened them into taking us in … somehow, though, they were also convinced that one of us was handicapped, and so we had a room scaled to someone in a wheeklchair – the security peephole was at waist level in the door, the bathroom was a jungle gym of bars, pipes, levers, handles. It was odd, and really raised our awareness of how non-handicapped people do not grasp the simple necessities of life for the handicapped.

But at least we didn’t have to sleep under a hot dog cart in a hallway. We knew someone who did. The steam cart kept them warm.

Anyway, Michael and I drove up I-5 this afternoon after his classes ended – college not taking a back seat to Cons in my book – and had a wonderful drive. The clouds were amazing, drifting and re-arranging themselves constantly; we even got rained on here and there. The west was filled with whipped cream. Hawks and ravens sported everywhere, hovering on thermals and pretending their grandfathers were hummingbirds. Cows had calves at their sides, sheep had lambs. We saw classic cars – Memorial Day Weekend is when the Fae start driving up and down the Californnia highways, you know. We saw a fire truck being carried home dead on an enormous flatbed. We saw a van emblazoned with a very unusual company name: Quake Finders. It had a huge ladder on its roof; made us wonder if they maybe went down into faults in their searches? Are sand worms the answer?

All in all, it was a vastly entertaining drive. The cross-over on Highway 152, through the Pacheco Pass, was especially beautiful – golden hills, oak savannah and waves of oats glittering in the wind.

And now we’re ensconsed in a comfy hotel room with a view of those same golden hills, east of Santa Clara. We also have a nice view of the Convention Center and the Great America theme park there. If there is a roller coaster disaster, we’ll have a front row seat.

Things should get more exciting tomorrow. Alien anatomy! First Contact! The 501st Legiion vs. Space Amazons!

Who knows? It could happen.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment