Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker  loved the act of writing.

She always had, from her first flow-of-consciousness baby scribbles (you know, big loops and zigzags done in private languages and crayon) to her last staccato typing on a wireless keyboard. It’s why she never took to speech-enabled software.

We tried out Dragon during her last year, to see if it let her compose directly when she was too weak to sit up and type. Which it did, of course; but it was no fun. No fun for Kage, anyway – I laughed myself half to death, because the program faithfully reproduced all her muttering to herself as she dictated, and then devolved quickly into profanity when she noticed …

Anyway, there was no joy in just reciting. Kage wanted feedback of some sort. Writing longhand was her favourite writing medium well into her 30’s, because she loved the flow of smooth black ink onto clean empty paper. Clear virgin pages were a visual thrill, and seeing her thoughts spool out behind the stylus of a good pen was a visceral delight. She was very picky about both paper and pens – what she liked best of all was plain, good quality typing paper, and a Cro Quill pen dipped in Higgins Waterproof Black Ink. She used legal pads because the narrow lines and pale green paper pleased her, though a steel nib would sometimes write right through a couple of pages at once … Felt tips were an object of her lasting scorn. Pilot Pens finally came up with a small enough ball and a smooth enough ink to please her, and make of writing the unencumbered act of creation Kage demanded.

She kept it up as her favoured medium all the way through In The Garden of Iden, and the first three iterations of Sky Coyote (novella, short story, novel … it expanded and shrank like an accordion). Then she mastered the computer and finally found the perfect composition method. Though she used to speculate wistfully on when someone would come up with that science fiction staple, the thoughtwriter.

I don’t blame her; never did. I think she might have had the same trouble that she did with Dragon, though, because she continued to compose in several voices at once and in nothing resembling  a straight line. It just would have been quieter until she blew up at the machine.  Kage needed a filter or a governor between her and the page.

I am now giddily in the throes of writing, having dug my way through the gate of steel and tower of adamant circumscribing my ability to compose. A keyboard is second nature to me; I’ve earned my living with one since I was 19. Now my only problem is time: management of and passage through …  I want to work on the story (“The Teddy Bear Squad”), and I want to get a blog written maybe every day, and I need to stop at intervals to research.  One of the greatest of mod cons, for the average writer, is the ability to do research as ideas appear, right freaking there at your desk. But you still have to stop writing to do it, which is a pain …

Can I find an English to Hittite dictionary online? What parts of Highway 1 have fallen off lately? Tell me everything about polar bear fur. Are we out of bologna?

Kimberly is an enormous help, and knows how to keep me moving and alive. I can’t remember the damned word for mercury ore! I moan to her; an hour later I come back to my desk and find a note reading (in her inhumanly tidy printing) CINNABAR. Nothing else, but it’s all I need to get back up to speed. And she makes me coffee, and refills my water glass, and reminds me to occasionally eat and take my tana leaves every day.

This is why it’s handy to have artistes in sororal clutches. Just ask the Bronte girls. Or Jane and Cassandra Austen. Not that I’m in their leagues, but – I have the same problems, just as Kage did. And we both came to their solution.

More important than the pen, the paper, any medium you can imagine; more vital than the reference sources, whether you’re riffling frantically through the Peterson Guide to Mammals of North America or trying to access the Galactic Library through an outdated browser. When the writing grabs you by the throat, you need help to deal with everything you need to do just to make it through the day. Sisters are the best.

And now, back to the vicious purple squirrels …

Kage Baker used to say she was always ready to be ambushed. By a story idea, is what she meant – she’d found it was possible (but not easy) to just set out and track one down and pounce on it. But it was a lot simpler to let one drop on you out of the branches of inspiration. So she preferred to lurk around ideas’ known haunts, and look – you know, sort of … careless.

“Like money is just falling out of my decolletage, and I’m wearing too much jewellry,” she would explain. “And I’ve maybe had 1 or 2 too many cocktails and I’m not sure of the way home …”

“And how do we persuade your muse of that?” I would inquire.

“Well, let’s start by going somewhere too far away to walk home, and have 1 or 2 too many cocktails!”

And we would, and we did, and it frequently worked. We’d drive home with Kage’s Muse, leaning over her shoulder from the rear seat, his hand on the back of her neck. And they would disappear into the darkened chambre of her computer screen and strange delights would ensue. Ultimately, Dear Readers, most of you would end up reading the results.

That’s how well it worked.

The last several weeks, I have been mired in that crowded and low-class resort, that Sargasso Sea of desperation, Writer’s Block. It’s a nasty, cold block, too, with half the streetlights burned out and the rest too bright. The motels are never quite full, so there’s always a horrible room available – all 4 walls different disgusting colours, right beside the railroad tracks and the ice machine. It’s an awful place to be.

But a few days ago, I escaped. There was yestreday’s wonderful news from the inestimable Sheila Williams of Asimov’s. And in all my sleeping hours lately, story ideas have been circling and teasing like the harem fish in Fantasia. Today one idea finally leaped out like Errol Flynn down a splitting mainsail, and that’s what I’ve been working on today instead of writing a blog. But it’s not quite midnight, and I can get this in just under the deadline, and feel really pleased with myself!

I’ll probably be working on two stories at once – trading off, so as not to lose time to getting stuck again. A tiny idea that barely started a few months ago has abruptly caught fire, and I am heading now toward 1,000 words for “The Teddy Bear Squad”. That one is a Company story.

I haven’t quite figured out what the other one will be, but I’d like it to be a non-Company tale. Just for variety. We shall see.There’s something about squids that is lurking around. Squids, and tacos.

How’s that for a siren song? Time alone will tell what leaps out of the dark, I guess. For now  – I’ll go languish under a lamp post and look … unengaged.

Kage Baker observed a lot. People-watching was her favourite sport. Being naturally shy, and possessed of the quiet camouflage skills of a doe, she spent a great deal of her time out in public being both invisible and watchful.

It’s a requisite skill for writers, really. For the same reason, Kage subscribed to certain fairly esoteric magazines, and checked daily on some unusual websites. Some of them, like the continuing history of Cliff House in San Francisco, she checked for love and heart’s ease. Others, like old maps and archeology and ancient technologies, she sought consciously in her research.

There were things in which she was not interested, though, that nonetheless regularly yielded nuggets of gold for her story research. Those she farmed out to me. From time to time I came up with some new headline or unobserved topic that gave Kage an idea, or amplified one she was already contemplating. I kept her abreast of the advances (and retreats) in rocket engineering, telescope development, stellar phenomenon and weird biology; I was her private clip service for those things she knew she might need to see, but was simply not fond of studying.

For one thing, mathematics panicked Kage – the heritage of a miserable time in grammar school, where the one thing she couldn’t do was understand numbers. For another, she didn’t like gore. Or violence. Or bones. She could write about all these things with enormous skill, but she really disliked reading about or looking at them. Engineering up to the level of steam fascinated her; after that, it bored her. She needed it explained to her not because she didn’t understand it – but because she needed to find a way to relate to it at all. Translation was my job.

And she just didn’t have the physical time to spend on everything she needed to do. The saying is, that there are only 24 hours in a day – but Kage maintained that was merely a consensus opinion, agreed to so society would not collapse. There were more hours than that in her own system, and even then, they weren’t enough.

As it happens, I am interested in extinction. Especially mass extinction – it’s an interest that seems to me to be a natural companion to an interest in evolution. Kage was pretty much repulsed by the idea of mass extinctions, but she did listen when I talked about it, in hopes of isolating an idea; extinctions are certainly in the job description of the Operatives! She eventually got interested in the topic, especially since the present time seems headed for another mass extinction at a high speed …

Thus it was that we came to believe that the human race was responsible for the disappearance of the mega-mammals. Giant animals largely died out when the dinosaurs did: most of the giants then were dinosaurs. When mammals took over, they were small. But they eventually produced their own giants in nearly every family. Giant bears, sloths, cattle, beavers, armadillos, dogs, cats, shrews, deer, squirrels, apes, lemurs. Sea cows and otters and dolphins and whales, and only the whales have survived as giants. What happened to all of them?

As it turns out, we actually know what happened to the giant lemurs and sea cows: they lived on islands, and so it took longer for humans to find them and their demise occurred in modern history:  passing sailors ate them. And there is a strong indication that hungry, hungry humans are also what happened to the continental mega-fauna – everything from armadillos the size of Volkswagons, to cows 8 feet high at the shoulder, to enormous carnivorous kangeroos. Lots of biologists hold to this theory now ( and, of course, lots do not. Loudly …) but Kage and I also reached the conclusion on our own while studying the American mega-fauna in particular.

Everywhere the mega-mammals lived, they stopped doing so when human beings hove on the horizon. The one exception is Africa, where the giant mammals evolved with human beings: it’s taken much longer for elephants and rhinos and giraffes and hippos to become endangered by Homo sapiens. (Giant crocodilians  in Africa are, in fact, holding their own; but that’s a different story … ) In Asia, in Europe, in North and South America – humans appeared and mega-mammals vanished. We ate ’em.

And we continue to eat entire species right off the face of the earth.  Not just mammals, but reptiles, amphibians, birds and even insects have ended their existence on a butcher’s slab. Every year for at least the last decade, some species either unknown or thought already gone is found neatly gutted in local markets – usually in Asia and Africa. We may never know if some of them are, indeed, extinct or just hiding: because all we have of the single specimen located are stripped bones and photos.

Right now, in Africa and Asia, all eight species of pangolins are being eaten into extinction. They are weird little mammals, scaled like a dragon or a pair of Renaissance gauntlets; they’re quite cute, rare, and very edible. The people who eat them are poor, and many: they don’t believe the story that they will ever run out of pangolins, and even if they did – what’s that to a hungry child of your own?

But also right now, in Florida, lion fish are devastating the coastal ecosystem. They’re invasive fish tank escapees native to the Southern Hemisphere – they have poisonous spines, and no natural enemies here anyway. However, they themselves are NOT poisonous – in fact, they’re both edible and delicious. And the only thing that seems capable of preventing them from devastating the coast of Florida is for human Floridians to do what they do best and EAT the suckers!

There’s a small campaign urging this patriotic piscicide,  but in the meantime the lionfish are spreading. And the pangolins are diminishing. Can we get some priorities straightened out here and please devour the right animals? Fisheries are collapsing everywhere; here’s one we can eat without moral misgivings!

I bet there are other animals upon which we could work our special Homo sapiens voodoo. Can’t Australia export rabbit fur and meat? It’s damned useful and delicious, and usually expensive. Can’t we develop fishing industries from the invasive alien fish and molluscs we’ve scattered everywhere? Zebra mussels aren’t very big, but they’d work in chowder and bouillabaisse. Hell, even cane toads could be used in mulch – and Australia needs mulch, most of her earth is desert.

Eating things seems to be one of our super powers, and there are 7 freaking billion of us . If we could just concentrate on getting the invasive protein to the hungry, we could finally do some good with our appetites and numbers.

Just a little suggestion, Dear Readers, from me and Kage. And the pangolins.

Kage Baker was not a hard science person; not unless you include hands-on disciplines like carpentry or blacksmithing, anyway. Truly complicated and diamond-level hard science tended to dazzle and entertain her: it was a marvel and she could never see the strings, so she enjoyed it.

Force fields, magnetism, energy patterns; as good as fireworks, for Kage. The electromagnetic maps that show the intricate coils of the Earth’s own magnetic field fascinated her with their intricacy and beauty. The very idea of magnetic envelopes intrigued her -like the Klein bottle, described as a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold: a container both immaterial and yet impenetrable. And, of course, available from Acme Products in more mundane glass (www. kleinbottle.com). Along with rocket skates, pocket holes, and death rays …

Kage was confident humanity would develop space flight: just as soon as it could make someone lots of money. She watched the growth of companies like Space X with glee, and wouldn’t be at all surprised that they have now almost taken over travel to and from the International Space Station. The Luna Consortium and the Mars Corporation are only a matter of time. The military has pretty much dropped the space ball, as she always suspected they would. But she believed that because she also believed in the inevitability of heroes and homesteaders.

She researched such scientific topics as her stories required with determination, but she wasn’t interested in most of the basic concepts. As she observed, a lack of talent in a field can be compensated for by dogged study – but nothing would fill  in the gaps left by boredom.

However, Kage always made a genuine effort to comprehend anything she thought she needed for a story. Even if the concept was not explicitly explained in her text, she felt it was necessary to at least have a painted savage’s idea of what was going on.

“Why aren’t there Cliff Notes for FTL drives? Or at least thuribles*?” she’d moan.

“You mean an ansible,” I would snicker. “Unless you want to send smoke signals.”

“Oh, screw you. Find me whatever the hell will let people on Mars talk to Earth without a half hour hole in the conversation!”

In the end, she decided to leave the gap in, for dramatic purposes. But first, she researched the concept of ansibles so she at least understood how they were supposed to work, and what it meant when they didn’t. The actual mechanics of either the problem or its theoretical solution were irrelevant, except in supplying the plot with dramatic tension and a time line.

Conversely, it’s an ansible using the energy of time travel itself that allows the 24/7, real-time connection of Operatives to the Bases through their ubiquitous credenzas. The Company needed the device, for the exact same reasons that Kage decided Mars I and II did not. Not to mention Alex and Captain Morgan en route to their disastrous rendezvous with the MAC …

Luckily, it’s also been obvious throughout the history of science fiction that some devices are as universal as they are imaginary – and FTL drives and ansibles are pretty much the top of the list. (“Ansible”, in fact, was coined from Prospero’s thin air by Ursula K. Le Guin, and has now become a common use-word: like Kleenex, or Xerox. But it owes its birth to Madame Le Guin, who is seldom credited sufficiently for the vital word. Thank you, Lady!) They can be used in genre plots without invoking the attendant physics that make them work, and in fact most authors don’t bother to explain them.

However, each writer probably does have some private concept of how the machinery of their Universe works. It may not be explicable – which is why it hasn’t been included in the text. Or it may be based on some private line of reasoning that the writer is loath to share: either because they know it’s arrant nonsense or because they fear the Men In Black will come steal the idea. Frequently, though, it’s based on the projection of developments in some field of inquiry that does indeed exist – magnetism, ion production, fission, fusion, or layers of oysters on the hull* …

Kage not being terribly interested in interstellar flight, she simply didn’t get into superluminal engines at all. Antigravity, artificial gravity, and improved attitude jets gave her interplanetary shuttles all they needed to wend their ways between Earth and the rest of the Solar System. But she did have an idea of how it all worked. There was a process in her mind, because otherwise – how could she have written about it? She had to know how it worked.

She declined to discuss it much (especially with readers who wanted to know precisely how Time Travel and Antigravity worked) but she figured they tied in with Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The special circumstances that allowed them to work were in the source of the original movement, and in the substance being acted upon. Those, per Kage, were Clarkian Magic: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

That combination was enough to her to form a working model in her mind; one solid enough to be written about. A few more details occurred to her as time went on, and as her research continued. But those were enough to start the whole thing in  the first place.

All this is at least one answer to that deadly question: where do you get your ideas? From the fabled Post Office Box in New Jersey. From a scribbled note in a Klein bottle washed up on Pismo Beach. From somewhere in a nest of snakes …

And all of them biting their tails.

Acme Klein bottle with philosophical accessories

* Look it up, kids, as my own teachers always told me.