No Beginning, No End...

I've been reading previously published stories for my Alien Contact anthology, to be published by Night Shade Books in November. This reading is an ongoing process amidst everything else I do, other deadlines that I have. See my previous blog post, "We Have Alien Contact," for background on this anthology, including a complete listing of the stories (so far) that have been submitted and/or recommended to me, in addition to stories that I myself have added to the list as well.

Currently I'm reading the novella-length story "Bradbury Weather" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, which was originally published in 2005 in Subterranean Magazine issue #2. The story is included in the author's science fiction collection, A Is for Alien, also published by Subterranean Press, in 2009. Caitlín recommended two stories to me that she felt would be appropriate for the anthology, and kindly provided me with a review copy of A Is for Alien in PDF format, which I am now able to read on my new Sony PRS-950 Daily Edition eReader. (I already have a blog post planned on the eReader and related issues.)

I don't recall ever quoting a fictional character in one of my blog posts, so this is probably a first. But I was so taken with a quote in the opening paragraph of "Bradbury Weather" that I had to post it here. The paragraph appears in a collection of proverbs written by an anonymous Gyuto monk; the book is in the possession of Dorry, the protagonist in the story:

No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their truer nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a construct of the mind of man." ― a Gyuto monk

So is the monk simply referring to the beginning and end of an actual story? Or is he referring to the story of one's life? Or am I just toying with some philosophical conundrum that really has no meaning whatsoever other than to occupy a few lines in the opening paragraph of a fictional story? Indeed, this is a quote from a fictional character in a work of fiction, but then again aren't these words, in some, albeit creative, way, spoken, or at least written, by the author herself?

By the way, the protagonist reads that one paragraph one last time, three pages before the end of "Bradbury Weather": "I open the book and read the words aloud again, the words underlined in red ink, that I might understand how not to lose my way in this tale which is almost all that remains of me."

In the Company of Kage Baker

Update: January 31, 2010: Sadly, I have just learned that Kage Baker passed away this morning. My thoughts are with her sister Kathleen, her niece "Emma Rose," her extended family, friends, and readers. If I may borrow some words from Jeff VanderMeer: "I would like to think that this is not the end, that instead [Kage has] merely been assigned by The Company to some new mission." Regardless, rest in peace, Kage. I am so grateful for the time -- and the projects -- we've shared together.

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My friend, author Kage Baker, is extremely ill. I knew last year that Kage was ill, but it wasn't until we spoke together at the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California, over Halloween weekend -- Kage in a wheelchair while her sister Kathleen looked after her -- that I learned that the evil culprit was cancer. At the con, Kage informed me that she had surgery scheduled, but the prognosis wasn't as dire then as it had become by Christmas eve, when cancer had been found in Kage's brain.

Kage had chosen not to publicly announce her illness and, respecting her wishes, I kept this knowledge to myself. But that silence has now been broken with this announcement by Kage's caregiver and sister, Kathleen Bartholomew, in which she states: "If we are lucky, the therapies will win [Kage] a few months; if we are incredibly lucky, 6 months to a year. If she gets more than that, it will be a literal miracle...."

But then, isn't that what our genre is all about: miracles, both fictional and real?

Kathleen goes on to say: "[Kage] is not giving up, though, and neither -- obviously! -- am I. I have been her caregiver for 8 months now, and am not going to surrender as long as there is the smallest chance of her living through this."

What Kathleen is asking for is your support: "Please send cards, thoughts, prayers and all the healing energy and love you can!" You can send your prayers and thoughts via email to materkb@gmail.com and they will be printed and read to Kage immediately. Letters, notes, cards and anything else you can think of can be sent to her home:
Kage Baker
331 Stimson, Apt. B
Pismo Beach CA 93449

Back in 1997 I started hearing rumblings of a new time travel novel that was soon to be published -- a story about a group of immortals who traveled back in time, saving (read: salvaging) artifacts in the past for later "discovery" in the future. Sounds like a good thing, right? Saving pieces of the past so that they are not lost and thus can be appreciated by those in the future? Except that most of the saving was being done for future profit, and many of these immortal cyborgs -- and the masterminds behind them -- were not so virtuous, or, let's just say that things weren't so black and white as they initially appeared. The novel was In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker, and it was first published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1997. I purchased the UK hardcover edition because I didn't want to wait until the following year for the US Harcourt edition.

That group of time traveling immortals -- and the masterminds behind them -- became known as "The Company" -- officially Dr. Zeus Incorporated (or Jovian Integrated Systems, if you are familiar with the Alec Checkerfield stories) and, its Victorian-era precursor, the Gentlemen's Speculative Society. In the Garden of Iden was followed by Sky Coyote in 1999, Mendoza in Hollywood in 2000, and The Graveyard Game in 2001, all from publisher Harcourt.

Though I had read the first two novels, the one story that really made me take notice was novella "Son Observe the Time," originally published in the May 1999 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and reprinted in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection, which is where I first read the story. The events in this story take place just before the 1909 San Francisco earthquake; living in the San Francisco Bay Area, earthquakes are near and dear to my heart. [We just had a 5-pointer about three weeks ago.] After reading this one story, I then tried to read all the "Company" short stories that I could find. In May 2001, I contacted Kage Baker via email about the possibility of a short story collection; at the time I was acquiring and editing for Golden Gryphon Press. Kage responded the very same day, stating that she was intrigued with my proposal and that she has forwarded my letter to her agent Linn Prentis¹; they would get back to me on this soon. On May 9 I received an email from Linn: "We are thrilled that you are interested in doing a Baker Company collection. Kage has put together a list [of stories] and we are checking it for possible conflicts." Linn went on to ask about terms and a possible publication date.

My plan was to publish the collection in time for the 2002 WorldCon, which would take place about six or so miles from my home, in downtown San Jose, August 29 through September 2 [my birthday and my anniversary!²]. And since Kage resided in Pismo Beach, about 190 or so miles south, this would allow her to hopefully attend the convention as well and help promote the book. That may sound like a lot of time -- May 2001 to August 2002 -- but that was typical for a Golden Gryphon Press book; much of the lead time had to do with scheduling certain aspects of the publication process to coincide with the distributor's (Independent Publishers Group) twice-yearly marketing catalog. Of course, the contents had to be determined, the selected reprint stories formatted and copyedited, the original stories formatted, edited, and copyedited, original cover art commissioned, ancillary material written, and so forth.

At Home with Jack Vance

At 92 years of age (soon to be 93, on August 28), author Jack Vance is finally garnering some long-overdue, well-deserved attention in the media. And considering that he hasn't published any new fiction since 2004 (novel Lurulu, sequel to Ports of Call, 1998; both from Tor Books), this is indeed a remarkable accomplishment. Why all the media attention now? Because Vance has two books that have just been published by Subterranean Press. First and foremost is Vance's autobiography, This Is Me, Jack Vance! (more on this in a bit). The second title is anthology Songs of the Dying Earth, which is subtitled "Stories in Honor of Jack Vance." Songs features some of the best writers in the genre: Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin (who co-edited the anthology), Lucius Shepard, and Dan Simmons, to name only four, with an appreciation by Dean Koontz. What makes this book even more special is that Vance himself has written a new preface to open the anthology.

Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College, wrote an excellent and lengthy piece (nearly 3,700 words) on Jack Vance entitled "The Genre Artist" in the July 15 New York Times. Rotella's introduction to Vance's fiction occurred when he was 14 years old, and he's been reading the author's work ever since. In this article Rotella quotes from a number of Vance novels, quotes from contributors (Tanith Lee and Dan Simmons) to the Songs anthology, and even quotes from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon: "Jack Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve. If 'The Last Castle' or 'The Dragon Masters' had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he's Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there's this insurmountable barrier." Well said, Mr. Chabon! I'm awaiting my copy of This Is Me, Jack Vance! from Subterranean Press, but in the meantime I have Rotella's article to tide me over. By the way, Rotella notes that "Vance takes pride in his craft but does not care to talk about it in any detail, going so far in his memoir as to consign almost all discussion of writing to a brief chapter at the end." If you're not familiar with Jack Vance, this article is a great mini-introduction to Vance's work, and his life. Kudos to Carlo Rotella.

I personally lay all the blame for my rampant book collecting on Jack Vance... Well, that's not really fair: his mass market paperback publishers Berkley Medallion and DAW Books actually share that dubious honor. I was already an avid book reader, but it was Jack Vance's Demon Princes series that drove me to my bibliophilic behavior. I don't recall how the Demon Princes series was brought to my attention, but in the early '80s I made a concerted effort to track down these five books. Now, you have to remember that at that point in time, there was no internet; there was no "online" in which to do an online book search. In those days we actually had to visit bookstores; and we used the telephone and, dare I say it, book catalogs sent through the mail to acquire specific titles. My favorite bookstore was Books, Inc. in the Town & Country shopping center near the corner of Stevens Creek and Winchester boulevards in San Jose. Books, Inc. closed down not too long after the Barnes and Noble superstore opened about a block away; and now the entire Town & Country shopping center is gone, replaced by the upscale Santana Row. But back to Books, Inc.: The store was a panacea for SF readers in particular because the management never returned a book. Regardless of the number of copies they ordered of any particular paperback, those copies would remain on the shelves until they sold. You could find paperbacks on the shelves that were years old, the pages often yellowed from age. So that's where I went to purchase the five volumes in Vance's Demon Princes series. The first three books in the series -- Star King, The Killing Machine, and The Palace of Love -- were published in the '60s by Berkley Medallion; the final two books in the series -- The Face and The Book of Dreams -- were published by DAW Books in 1979 and 1981 respectively. Unfortunately, I only found one of the DAW books on the shelf. A clerk assisted me by looking up the other four titles in Books in Print (available as a set of humongous hardcovers as well as on microfiche). It turned out that two of the five titles were out of print -- one from Berkley Medallion and the first book from DAW. And, not understanding the stupidity of publishers at the time, I couldn't comprehend why any publisher would allow the middle books of a five-book series to go out of print. It just didn't make any sense to me -- then. But in the course of looking through Books in Print, the clerk discovered that the series had been published in a hardcover edition by an independent press called Underwood-Miller. Great, I said, let's order them. Sorry, said the clerk, we don't deal directly with that publisher, and those titles aren't available through our regular distributor. Sigh... Time to go home and make some telephone calls to other bookstores in the area.

This is how I discovered genre bookstore Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, about a 25-mile drive from where I live. I telephoned the store, and yes, they could order the books for me, but I would have to pay for them in advance. So I made the drive to Palo Alto, only to discover that the store proprietor would only order one volume at a time -- even though I was willing to pay for the five books all at once, up front. Not sure of her rationale; but keep in mind that this was the early '80s and each of these trade hardcovers cost, I believe it was, $20.00 each -- so the set of five books was $100.00 (plus tax). Anyhow, I paid for the first book in advance, returned to the store a couple weeks later when the book arrived and paid in advance for the next one in the series, and so on until I owned all five books. Of course, I was now hooked on hardcovers and limited editions, having been in Future Fantasy -- browsing and buying -- six times over the span of about three months: the road to ruin, you might say. Future Fantasy moved a few years later to a larger store, but then the local competition and the internet finally took its toll and the store closed as well.