Kage Baker

Kage Baker
Kage Baker in 2009
Born	Mary Kate Genevieve Baker (1952-06-10)June 10, 1952 Hollywood, California, United States
Died	January 31, 2010(2010-01-31) (aged 57) Pismo Beach, California, United States
Occupation	Writer
Period	1997–2010
Genre	Science fiction Fantasy
Website
kagebaker.com (archived)

Kage Baker (June 10, 1952 – January 31, 2010) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer.

Biography

Baker was born and raised in Hollywood, California, and lived in Pismo Beach later in life. Before becoming a professional writer she spent many years in theater, including teaching Elizabethan English as a second language. Her unusual first name (pronounced like the word cage) is a combination of the names of her two grandmothers, Kate and Genevieve. Baker had Asperger syndrome.

She is best known for her "the Company/Dr. Zeus, Inc." series of historical time travel science fiction. Her first stories were published in Asimov's Science Fiction in 1997, and her first novel, In the Garden of Iden, by Hodder & Stoughton in the same year. Other notable works include Mendoza in Hollywood (novel, 2000) and "The Empress of Mars" (novella, 2003), which won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and was nominated for a Hugo Award.

In 2008, she donated her archive to the department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

In 2009, her short story "Caverns of Mystery" and her novel House of the Stag were both nominated for World Fantasy Awards, but neither piece won.

In January 2010, it was reported that Baker was seriously ill with cancer. She died from uterine cancer at approximately 1:00 a.m. on January 31, 2010, in Pismo Beach, California. She was survived by five younger siblings, mostly located in southern and central California.

In 2010, Baker's The Women of Nell Gwynne's was nominated for a Hugo Award and a World Fantasy Award in the Best Novella categories. On May 15, 2010, that work was awarded the 2009 Nebula Award in the Best Novella category.

Kage spent much of the last year of her life watching and reviewing silent films. Many of her reviews were collected posthumously into Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Trainwrecks of the Silent Screen (2011), edited by her sister Kathleen Bartholomew. From the foreword:

All these reviews were written during the last year of Kage's life. I don't think that affected her view much—sometimes she was so tired that watching films and composing reviews was all she could manage, so they got her nearly undivided attention. As the year wore on, more and more of them were composed ex tempore and dictated to me; I think there is a more conversational style in those, as we argued out the reviews. One she recited in a single long soliloquy in her hospital room; it was written that evening, as I doggedly transferred Kage's voice from my head to paper.

The last one is dated December 21, 2009. Three days later, we discovered her cancer had metastasized to her brain. A month later, she was gone.

Baker left an unfinished novel, Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea, which has been completed by her sister Kathleen Bartholomew based on extensive notes left by Baker, and was published in 2012.

Bibliography

The Company universe

Novels

• In the Garden of Iden (1997)
• Sky Coyote (1999)
• Mendoza in Hollywood (2000) (published in the UK as At the Edge of the West)
• The Graveyard Game (2001)
• The Life of the World to Come (2004)
• The Children of the Company (2005)
• The Machine's Child (2006)
• The Sons of Heaven (2007)
• The Empress of Mars (2009) (novel version)
• Not Less than Gods (2010)
• Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea (2012)

Short story collections

• Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers (2002)
• Gods and Pawns (2007)
• In the Company of Thieves (2013)

Short stories and novellas

• The Empress of Mars (2003) (novella version)
• The Angel in the Darkness (limited edition chapbook, 2003)
• Where the Golden Apples Grow (2006) (novella)
• Rude Mechanicals (2007)
• The Women of Nell Gwynne's (limited edition, 2009) (Also released as 'Nell Gwynne's Scarlet Spy')

Novels

• The Hotel Under the Sand (2009) (juvenile) Tachyon Publications

The Anvil of the World

• The Anvil of the World (2003)
• The House of the Stag (2008) (Prequel to The Anvil of the World)
• The Bird of the River (2010)

Short fiction

Collections

• Mother Ægypt and Other Stories (2004) (title story takes place in the Company universe)
• Dark Mondays (2006)
• The Best of Kage Baker (2012) (includes stories set in and out of the Company universe)

Stories

Title	Year	First published	Reprinted/collected	Notes
Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key	2008			Novella
Pareidolia	2015	Bartolomew, Kathleen & Kage Barker (March 2015). "Pareidolia". Asimov's Science Fiction. 39 (3): 22–39.		Novelette

Non-fiction

• Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Trainwrecks of the Silent Screen, ed. Kathleen Bartholomew (2011) Tachyon Publications

Further reading

• Eldridge, Cat (June 1, 2005). "An Interview with Kage Baker". The Green Man Review. Archived from the original on December 8, 2011. Retrieved March 11, 2012.
• Gevers, Nick (Winter 2009). "Interview: Of Mars and the Spanish Main: An Interview with Kage Baker by Nick Gevers". Subterranean Press. Archived from the original on March 11, 2012. Retrieved March 11, 2012.
• Hartwell, David (September 7, 2010). "On Kage Baker". Tor.com. Macmillan. Retrieved March 11, 2012.
• Martini, Adrienne (June 2004). "An Interview with Kage Baker". Bookslut. Retrieved March 11, 2012.
• VanderMeer, Jeff (March 2007). "An Interview with Kage Baker". Clarkesworld Magazine. Retrieved March 11, 2012.

External links

• Archived official website
• Kathleen, Kage & the Company, blog about Kage by her sister Kate
• Kage Baker entry at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Kage Baker at Free Speculative Fiction Online
• Kage Baker at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Kage Baker silent film reviews at Tor.com