by vol 25 no 09
Returning to the world of the Company, although neither it nor Dr. Zeus are ever mentioned, is the long novella, “Mother Aegypt,” from 2004. The story is set somewhere in Eastern Europe (north of the Danube, we’re told) in a time that is obviously premodern (if there are more specific temporal cues, I’ve missed them). The narrator, Golescu, is a mountebank, womanizer, and compulsive liar. Although something of a fool and an egotist, he’s obviously well educated. He claims to be of noble upbringing though there’s no way to know whether or not his story is true since he lies about everything. Golescu is quick to use others without conscience and may well be a sociopath. As the story opens, he’s on the run from people he’s presumably conned. Looking ridiculous as he wheezes down the road in a big-breasted, female clown suit for reasons never entirely explained, he takes cover in one of a pair of wagons, each painted “black as the robe of scythe-bearing Death” (129), which bear “in curious antiquated letters” the words “Mother Aegypt.” The inhabitants of the two wagons, we discover, are Emil, an intensely photophobic autist, and the eponymous Mother Aegypt, who travel the European countryside seemingly at random, gathering various examples of material culture, works of art, old swords, canes, and so forth for reasons that Golescu never figures out, while also eking out a living as, in his professional opinion, a not particularly successful or crowd-pleasing fortuneteller. Mother Aegypt, who has the body of a young and attractive woman but a face that seems at once ancient and timeless, is intensely secretive and seems to be, although the conman is too self-centered to notice, deeply depressed.
Only gradually will the reader realize that Mother Aegypt is in fact one of the Company’s immortal cyborgs (though, again, the story gives no specific references to the series). Although she agrees to let Golescu travel with her to look after Emil, she periodically leaves them, disappearing with all of the artifacts she’s collected, presumably to cache them somewhere safe to be rediscovered in the far future for the Company’s profit. While caring for Emil, who may also be a failed Immortal like Ezra in “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park,” Golescu discovers that the autist can perform a variety of savant tasks such as instantly knowing how many peas are in a jar, and he soon begins to exploit Emil’s talents in a series of cons. He also discovers, however, that Emil has other, even more unbelievable abilities. For example, when Golescu brews up a vat of fake medicine designed to make chickens’ eggs look richer (it’s just yellow dye), Emil adds a few chemicals of his own and suddenly we’re in Food of the Gods territory with giant poultry marauding across the countryside. Emil also mentions his periodic concocting of the Black Cup, which Golescue assumes, wrongly, is the source of Mother Aegypt’s immortality. Eventually, the conman convinces himself that he’s in love with the woman and that she secretly returns his favor. A spectacular climax occurs after Golescu convinces the immortal woman to eat a box of fancy chocolates. As fans of the Company series might guess, this turns out to be a very bad idea. Although the story is at times rather dark, it is perhaps no surprise to discover, as Kathleen Bartholomew in her story notes says, “Kage laughed out loud the whole time she was writing” “Mother Aegypt.”
The last two pieces in the book are Company tales set in Hollywood, where Baker grew up and about which she wrote a number of stories and novels set over a period of several centuries. The novella “Rude Mechanicals,” first published in 2007, centers on two of her reappearing cyborg characters, the somewhat OCD worrywart, Lewis, and his devil-may-care, action-oriented friend Joseph, both of whom are thousands of years old. It’s 1934, and Lewis has been assigned to preserve the promptbooks and production notes of the great European stage director, Max Reinhardt, who has come to America to escape the Nazis and direct an extravagant live version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the outdoor Hollywood Bowl. The 1935 film version of Reinhardt’s production starred James Cagney, a badly miscast Dick Powell, Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown, and Victory Jory, though only Rooney and de Havilland took part in the original Hollywood Bowl version. Joseph is involved in his own project tracing the whereabouts of a gigantic lost diamond, and he wants Lewis to get him a job on the set of the production because he believes that the gem is secretly buried near the Bowl. There’s some wonderful stuff here about Hollywood in the 1930s and about Reinhardt and his work—the great director is treated with complete respect—but mostly this is Baker’s sf version of a madcap 1930s comedy with real but minor actors of the period behaving badly while Lewis and Joseph go to extraordinary and sometimes hilarious lengths to catch up with the diamond. This MacGuffin, in turn, keeps getting handed off in a wild series of exchanges by people who have no idea what they’ve gotten hold of. Essentially “Rude Mechanicals” is a lightweight piece of froth, but as science fiction froth goes, it’s very well done. Only Connie Willis does this kind of thing as well as Baker does.
The final tale, the novelette, “Hollywood Ikons,” appears here for the first time, the second posthumous collaboration between Baker and Bartholomew to see print. As such, it holds up quite well. Narrated by the always ebullient Joseph and set in 1943, it concerns his adventures at a time when his cover job involved working as a studio detective assigned to keep the oft philandering Spencer Tracy out of trouble (Tracy’s lover, Ingrid Bergman, can’t stand Joseph, he tells us). Other than Tracy’s sex life, Joseph’s biggest problem appears to be the ever-fussy Lewis, who insists on moving in with him because Lewis’s apartment has a plague of rats and the landlord is being slow to deal with it. This, of course, gives us a bit of an Odd Couple vibe right off the bat. However, we quickly synch into what might be a reference to Monty Python’s “Killer Joke” skit when Joseph is assigned to hunt down a set of killer religious icons from ancient Constantinople, paintings done in such way that they are (for scientific reasons, of course!) deadly to any mortal who looks at them. Somehow these death-dealing religious artifacts have ended up in Hollywood, and our intrepid Joseph must hunt them down with the help of Lewis and one Slick Mick, an immortal gone bad who has become a hopelessly addle-brained chocolate addict (see “Mother Aegypt”). Then they must deal with their orders from Dr. Zeus to, rather unbelievably, send the icons on to the Nazis. Moral issues are invoked. Are the cyborgs merely tools of their far-future masters or do they have free will? Can they keep Hitler from getting the deadly art works? And how does all of this tie in with the rats in Lewis’s apartment?
Many of Baker’s key preoccupations are on display in this enjoyable collection: the detailed evocation of the past, particularly though not exclusively the California past, through diamond-sharp references to real but eccentric places and people; the odd but invariably effective mixture of serious, sometimes very dark action with humor that can veer between screwball comedy and outright parody; secret societies and the secret histories they engender; the question of what immortals might actually be like and how they might deal or fail to deal with all of the time on their hands. Combine these themes and others with sharp writing, well-developed characters, and a particularly strong sense of who should narrate or focalize each tale, and what we end up with is excellence. Wrap it up in another beautiful Tachyon Publications package, and what’s not to like? This book will make long-time fans very happy and, as is Bartholomew’s stated intent, should attract new readers to Kage Baker’s work as well.
Michael Levy is currently confined to a wheelchair after a close encounter of a surgical kind. Needless to say, he’s really grouchy and very much appreciated having this book to review.
Photos
NYRSF at Play: Bernadette L. Bosky and Arthur D. Hlavaty at the court of Peter Straub, ICFA 35 (March 2014).
The dashing Steve Erikson and the dramatic Jen Gunnels, to the nines. ICFA 35 (March 2014).
Editorial
Shameless Self-Promotion
I’m writing this in mid-May, with fairly high confidence that you will have it in your hot electronic hands well before the end of the month. Huzzah for being on schedule! I expect
the June issue will also be on time. July might slip because of convention season (see below), but not, I hope, by much, and then August and beyond should all be well under control.
I talk a lot about hitting and missing our schedule, because that’s one of the things David Hartwell drummed into me: once a monthly magazine starts getting cavalier about its deadlines, it stops being monthly, then stops being bi-monthly, then stops being quarterly, then stops being. Our schedule is a promise not just for this month, but for all months to come.
Our Back Pages
Periodically I like to remind people that (pretty much) our entire run is still available. We have paper copies of the first 24 years of NYRSF available at a new bargain price: $3/issue for any issue of your choice; if you order more than 5 issues, the price drops to $2 each, and 100 or more paper issues of your choice are only $1 each! You can also get our grab bags, sets of 40 unique, random, irreplaceable issues for $20, 60 issues for $30, or 80 for $40. E-mail [email protected] for more information. Take a look at our index
More recent back issues—volume 24 and up, from September 2011 onward—are also available through Weightless Books for a mere $2.99 each in the standard array of formats—epub and Mobi for e-readers, PDF for large-screen readers or for printing out. You can find those at
And for those who want shiny printed copies, all of volume 24 and up are available as print-on-demand double issues from Lulu.com at
Lights of Other Browsers
Another point that I don’t hit nearly often enough is that www.NYRSF.com is once again a going concern. Every issue, we post 3 or 4 articles from the issue on the site, with comments enabled (with screening and moderation), along with a full table of contents and this very selfsame editorial. Go check it out!
I also mention this periodically: The best ways to keep up with us online are through the NYRSF Facebook page (facebook.com/NYRSF) and the NYRSF Twitter feed, @nyrsf. In addition to new issue announcements and updates to the web site, we post/tweet things that we think are cool. And you like cool things or you wouldn’t be reading this.
Can’t Forget the Motor City
For me, the highlight of July is definitely going to be DetCon 1, the 2014 NASFiC (North American Science Fiction and Fantasy and All That Cool Stuff Convention), at which my wife, our husband, and I will be the joint Fan Guests of Honor. You can read more about us here
—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors