Kage Baker, Californian author of some of the finest and funniest American SF and fantasy of the last decade, is best known for her millennia-spanning series about the Company, a corporation hundreds of years from now which ransacks the past for loot and in so doing sets in motion a multitude of conspiracies by its time-travelling agents–immortal cyborgs–all focusing on a single apocalyptic day early in the twenty-fourth century. But after eight novels, two collections, and various related novellas and tales, that saga ended in 2007, and Baker is now working on exciting new projects. Her recent publications include pirate short novel Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key (Subterranean Press), the superb fantasy The House of the Stag (Tor), and The Empress of Mars, all about the rollicking life of pioneers on the red planet, and just out from Subterranean in a limited edition…

I interviewed Kage Baker by e-mail in early December, 2008.

NICK GEVERS: You’re quite prolific these days, with two new novels out in the space of a few months, as well as short stories… Are you in a particularly productive phase at present?

KAGE BAKER: Have to be! I was recently laid off from the place at which I’d been working for the last 13 years–businesses are closing all over town–and, since entertainment is about the only industry that thrives during a depression, I’m staking my chances on my writing career. I tend to block out books and story ideas years in advance, so I generally have a considerable backlog of material. The change in my economic status means I’m working through it faster.

It’s also true, though, that, having finished the Company story arc at last, I have had a tremendous sense of horizons widening. Stories that have been lurking in my subconscious for years are cascading onto the keyboard.

NICK GEVERS: Looking at your newest book, out from Subterranean in a limited edition now and from Tor in a few months: The Empress of Mars… This is an expansion of a very well-received novella of a few years ago, isn’t it? How did you set about lengthening it, and what elements of the novel are entirely new?

KAGE BAKER: Yes, this is an expansion of the original novella. David Hartwell pointed out to me that it might make a good novel, as there were a number of themes I’d only skimmed over in the original work. I was disinclined to do it at first; in every review of any expanded novella I’ve ever read, the reviewer invariably falls back on the word “bloated”. I went ahead with the novel for a couple of reasons, however. One was that, since the original version was published, there have been a lot of fascinating new discoveries on Mars. We poor Yanks have evidently learned to do metric conversion now, and Spirit and Opportunity just keep clanking along like Wall-E. I’m fascinated by the images they send back, the alien landscapes.

Another reason for expanding the book was that, really, I’d only sketched in the characters in the first version. It was a bit of a cartoon. But Mary actually had been a xenobotanist and worked in the system, and there was a lot more to Manco than I’d shown previously. How had these people, members of the original scientific team, become outsiders? Plus I wanted to pay a little more attention to the actual daily life of living on Mars–what sort of an economy does a failed colony develop? How do people live when they have to improvise housing and medical care? What sort of person emigrates to such a place? What sort of culture develops there?

So there are portraits where cartoons existed before. And there are several new characters and plotlines, some of which were introduced to deal with things I hadn’t had space to explore in the novella. Perrik Cochevelou, who solves the problem of large-scale agriculture on a planet where bees don’t exist and won’t pollinate even when they’re imported. Stanford Crosley, a gentleman entrepreneur from Luna exploring vice-related Arean business opportunities. Ottorino Vespucci, space cowboy and hero. Bill Nennius, whom astute readers of the Company series may recognize, doing his bit to destabilize the British Arean Company for reasons of his own. Ephesians Sister Morgan-Le-Fay and Sister Lilith, who meet an unlikely fate. The previously-unmentioned father of Mary’s granddaughter, who meets a sad one.

NICK GEVERS: Now that you mention Bill Nennius: even though your main sequence of Company novels–the Zeus Corporation, time-travel, the Botanist Mendoza, the Adonai Alec Checkerfield, and all that–ended in 2007 with The Sons of Heaven, The Empress of Mars does occur in the Company universe. Nennius and another of the Company’s cyborg operatives make appearances… Should Empress be viewed as a Company book, an integral part of the series and its timeline? Or more as a sidebar?

KAGE BAKER: It’s a sidebar, set in the Company universe and affected by Company politics to some extent, but subject to a lot of other influences as well. It’s even implied that Mars itself has its own agenda…

NICK GEVERS: Empress is very much a frontier novel, about pioneers on Mars, their difficulties and consolations, their clashes with authority, their rude culture, their spiritual aspirations. Amusingly, there is something of a postmodern element, an intertextual overlay: characters, like Ottorino Vespucci, who know Western cinema, and who base their “frontier” behaviour on that model. Can one view Empress as a revisionist Western, in which the frontier folk have the ironic advantage of historical wisdom, of critical hindsight?

KAGE BAKER: Yes, very much so. The Italian edition of the novella presented Empress as a romanza of the Old West on Mars, and I had a bit of fun developing that particular take, those tropes. Ottorino has seen all the right movies, and also been a historical re-enactor. He instinctively understands the historical forces at work, even though the reality of Mars is something of a rude shock. And he’s a wide-eyed romantic. Life on another planet shouldn’t be about depressed people having existential conversations in their life support capsules! Life on another planet should be High Adventure!! He imposes his own context on what he finds and, for him, it works out pretty well.

NICK GEVERS: Reading Empress, I was struck by a texture of magic realism, a hint maybe of Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude. The sense of community, the miraculous happenings, your poetic prose style… Or is any parallel accidental?

KAGE BAKER: Accidental, I think. I did go for a somewhat more dense, loopy prose style in Empress, with the intention of reflecting the Celtic culture of most of the characters. I had no intention of referencing Marquez, but the comparison is valid. And I think we’re tapping one of the Ten Basic Themes in Fiction, aren’t we? Bunch of people thrown together under peculiar circumstances, and their stories intertwine and play out? And miracles will, of course, occur, where human beings are. Now that I think of it, the TV series Northern Exposure played off that too.

NICK GEVERS: A strong continuity between the earlier Company novels and Empress is your satire on the British nanny state, its dislike of any nonconformism, its haste to condemn imagination and innovation. The British Arean Company, which in a sense governs Mars, has to deal with a lot of frontier mavericks in Empress, and the resulting culture clash is hilarious. You have great fun with this topic, don’t you?

KAGE BAKER: Well, I did have… lately it’s a little unsettling to see how many of my predictions are coming true. I get most of my news from the BBC and the examples keep popping up… take the recent “Days of Syn” fiasco. The area around Romney Marsh holds an annual festival to celebrate the fictional 18th-century smuggler, the Scarecrow AKA Dr. Syn. Every year, a guy dressed as the Scarecrow opens the festival by riding at full gallop down their little high street. But not this year… Health and Safety have decreed it isn’t safe. I believe the Scarecrow is allowed to walk, leading his horse… I love the Brits, I really do, and this sort of thing makes me wring my hands. I’m not even going to touch on the grimmer changes in America in the last eight years, because I haven’t got a big enough opener for that particular can of worms.

NICK GEVERS: Those best equipped in your books to escape and thwart the aforementioned nanny state seem to be Celts. Do you have an especial admiration for the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots Highlanders, and their continued differentiation from the stifling British mainstream?

KAGE BAKER: No, actually! I have Celtic roots on my mother’s side; I have a lifetime’s understanding based on observation of the Celtic temperament in friends and relations. A heightened sense of drama, long memories, substance abuse issues, eternally-held grudges, a tendency toward spite and self-pity… One can love something without admiring it particularly. What energizes the Celts versus the Brits in the Company universe is polarizing History playing out.

NICK GEVERS: Empress has an intriguing religious theme–even neo-pagans, worshippers of the Goddess in all Her guises, can fall victim to the errors and stupidities of organised religion if they accept a hierarchy. Are you satirising trends in present day paganism here?

KAGE BAKER: Yes indeed. I’m a sort of secular-humanist-agnostic person myself, but I’ve known a lot of neopagans in my time. Nothing wrong with it as a faith, when it’s observed in a joyful, celebratory sort of way. The love of the earth and seeing the divinity in everything is great. Some neopagans are wonderful people. But many I’ve known–sorry to say, all of them women–are anything but joyful or celebratory. They’re narrow-minded, condemnatory people who can’t keep a circle together because they’ve quarrelled with everyone. Their automatic response to anything is outrage. All of them claiming exclusive religious authority and excommunicating–oops, I mean Shunning–their peers. They exist to punish!

It’s hilarious in a sad way, because they’re behaving exactly like the early Christian theologians. Or the Reformation puritans. Bullies without an ounce of love in their hearts.

NICK GEVERS: At the end of Empress, certain perhaps unresolved plot threads could point to a sequel. Are you planning one, or is the future of Martian settlement already implied sufficiently in other Company books?

KAGE BAKER: Oh, I certainly plan to write more stories about the Martian frontier. No sequels, but freestanding stories about the gradual development of civilization on Mars, yes. And some of them will involve Mary, because she looms large in the history of Mars. I’ve already done a few stories, like “Maelstrom” and “Where the Golden Apples Grow”, along those lines.

NICK GEVERS: Even after Empress, you aren’t finished with the Company, are you? In particular, you still seem focused on Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, the earnestly heroic, and devious, Company agent in Victorian England. He features in the novelette “Speed, Speed the Cable!” in my recent steampunk anthology Extraordinary Engines, and it’s rumoured you’re writing a full-length novel about him. Can you say any more about your plans in this regard?

KAGE BAKER: I just turned in a novel, And We Are Everywhere, to Tor. It’s steampunk and involves the Victorian proto-Company, the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, as does the story in Extraordinary Engines. The GSS was first introduced in The Graveyard Game, and at the time I’d never heard of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or that British comedy group with a similar name. Now I wish I’d named my group something different, but it can’t be helped…

Anyway, the book deals with a young Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, how he’s recruited and trained, and the first mission he’s given, with two other trainees and an older, more experienced agent. I steeped myself in books on the Crimean War, Russia, and issues of Punch from the years 1846 to 1851. I researched arcane technologies. And, as with the other books, the characters took on lives of their own and did things that surprised me.

It was liberating, in a way, not to be writing about indestructible cyborg operatives. One set of characters appeared fairly briefly in the novel, but have occasioned a novella of their own, coming sometime next year from Subterranean: The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, about a sort of sister affiliate of the GSS, who operate a rather unique brothel in the vicinity of Whitehall.

NICK GEVERS: Moving away from the Company now, and to your other recent novel, The House of the Stag, published in September 2008 by Tor. What’s the relationship of this book to your other fantasy set in the same world, The Anvil of the World? Sequel, prequel, or neither?

KAGE BAKER: Neither. It’s set in the same universe and ends about twenty years before the start of The Anvil of the World, but the two stories are not thematically linked and there is no story arc connecting them. Certain characters do appear in both books, but you don’t have to have read one to understand the other.

NICK GEVERS: The House of the Stag seems to me an especially powerful book: plenty of your characteristic humour and rich plotting is present, but quite a lot of moral and ecological seriousness too. Is this because you’re so close to myth and archetype in this tale?

KAGE BAKER: The archetypes are fairly naked and obvious, yes. In a way, this is my ur-text; I started writing the earliest version of The House of the Stag when I was a fairly unsophisticated nine-year-old and just beginning to grasp how to tell a story. It continued to be written and re-written well into my twenties. I revisited it again in my thirties to incorporate passages from it into my first, unsold science fiction novel. It gathered dust for years at a time while I worked on other projects. One fragment of it, cleaned up for a short story, got enough favorable notice to prompt an entirely new book in Anvil.

The different openings for each section of House were an attempt to reflect that gradual evolution of storytelling process: rock paintings, account ledgers, vocal tradition, theater, epistolary accounts and, finally, the printed book.

NICK GEVERS: Will you explore the world of Anvil and House further in forthcoming books?

KAGE BAKER: Yes, I intend to. I have another book blocked out, unconnected to the other two, in the works. It’s about the crew of a river barge working their way up a long river, removing underwater snags that endanger cargo boats. One of them, diving, finds a corpse, and a train of events is set in motion. Characters include a young member of a gang family who’s been sent out to avenge the corpse, and a girl who develops the ability to “read” the river water.

NICK GEVERS: Another ongoing narrative in your work relates to Caribbean pirates–the novella “The Maid on the Shore”, the Subterranean Press short novel Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, and a story in the Ann and Jeff VanderMeer anthology, Fast Ships, Black Sails, all feature the dread buccaneers. Do these tales form a series? And what do you find especially appealing about that era and its seaborne outlaws?

KAGE BAKER: In so far as all the stories feature the character John James, they form a series. He started out as a spear carrier in “The Maid on the Shore” purely to provide a point of view, and then I had one of those moments when I saw his whole life story in my mind. So he’ll get a novel of his own, one day.

What is it about pirates? I loved the idea of their adventures and rebellion as a child, and in times of emotional stress it still appeals to me. Cutting through red tape. Firing cannons. Burning, looting, sailing away free on blue water. You put all that childhood fantasy behind you, and grow up and get a respectable job and do what’s expected of you, and then… one day you get laid off without a severance package, and your mortgage gets foreclosed, and you can’t afford your meds, and you realize: I should have run away to sea and joined a pirate crew. That’s where I went wrong. I might have been burning warehouses and drinking rum all this time!

NICK GEVERS: You have a short story in the forthcoming Martin/Dozois anthology Songs of the Dying Earth, a book of Jack Vance tributes. What’s the story called, and how did you adjust to setting a tale in another writer’s fictional universe?

KAGE BAKER: My story’s called “The Green Bird”. I had only read a few Vance stories, years and years back, but they had made strong impressions on me. When Gardner approached me about doing a story, I hunted up everything Vance had written about the Dying Earth and studied it closely; not just the world and its geography but Vance’s imagery, the way he coins words and delivers punchlines. The Dying Earth isn’t a pleasant place to visit, nor are its denizens people you would wish to meet, but the man’s writing gets inside your head and remains. I hope I’ve done his creation justice in my own effort.