The Company novels thus far are In the Garden of Iden (1997), Sky Coyote (1999), Mendoza in Hollywood (2000), The Graveyard Game (2001), The Life of the World to Come (2004) and The Children of the Company (2005); many of the shorter series entries are collected in the Golden Gryphon Press volume Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers (2002) and Mother Aegypt (Night Shade Books, 2004). Two Company novellas have appeared as chapbooks: The Angel in the Darkness (2003) and The Empress of Mars (2003).

Kage Baker is also the author of the splendid fantasy novel The Anvil of the World (2003). Science Fiction Weekly interviewed her by e-mail in February 2006. With the publication of The Life of the World to Come and The Children of the Company by your new publisher Tor, your long-running cycle of "Company" novels and stories has moved toward a conclusion. How many more Company books are planned? I see The Machine's Child is scheduled for late this year. ...

Baker: The Machine's Child takes the reader right to the brink; the novel following, The Sons of Heaven, finishes everything. Resoundingly. I may write further short stories or novellas set in the Company universe, and there may be a story collection from time to time (like Gods and Pawns, scheduled for February 2007). But I have no intention of ever again writing a series, in the sense of a multibook story arc. The scenario of the Company series—a corporation in the future employing immortal cyborgs to rescue and export uptime precious artifacts from all eras of history—allows you all sorts of wonderful narrative opportunities, for adventure, historical reconstruction, period farce, philosophical reflection and much besides. What, for you, have been the greatest rewards of writing the Company sequence? And have there been any pitfalls, expected or otherwise?

Baker: The greatest reward has been in a discovery of how entertaining human history is. Frequently heartbreaking, but often hysterically funny, and awe-inspiring generally. Gives one a sense of epochal patterns, and the processes by which cultures evolve and decay. ... Pitfalls? Certainly. An eight-book story arc means that, for the first few years, no one can see your mural in its entirety. Scaffolding and dropcloths are still obscuring it, and certain areas are only sketched in, or aren't there yet at all. No single part can be seen in its proper relation to the whole. Publishers and audiences have to trust you that the end result will be a work of staggering genius instead of a dismal self-indulgent multivolume mess. If I'd known in 1998 what I know now, I'd never have attempted a series.In the largest sense, is the Company cycle a commentary on cultural attitudes now—on postmodernism, on the way people appropriate and reinterpret history and heritage for entirely contemporary purposes?

Baker: In part, it is. That's certainly one of the themes. To give only one example: Working for the Living History Centre, I interacted with a lot of people in the Neopagan scene and also with persons who define themselves as Celts. I'm generally fairly sympathetic to the Neopagans, the more tolerant ones, anyway—who am I to tell them what to believe? But some of them have whipped up a past that never existed, and made it an article of faith. Neatly arranging the Celtic gods into a Roman-style 12-member pantheon, for instance, when in reality there were hundreds of Celtic gods, much closer to the Native American or Hindu belief system.

Same with the modern-day Celts. They're building on the Druid Revival, which arose because the Brits woke up after the Puritan frenzy of Cromwell and realized they'd trashed most of their own folk culture. Antiquarians like William Stukeley invented one, to fill in the missing heritage.

The historical Celts are long gone, thanks to the Roman occupation, and the Anglo-Saxon occupation, and the Vikings and Danes and Normans who assimilated them beyond recall. But you try and tell that to some kilt-wearing Yank git with spiral tattoos and blue face paint who uses Uncial font for all his personal correspondence and owns a broadsword. He'll threaten you no end, at least if you post on his renfaire list. The major characters in the Company books are your own creations, and memorable indeed, but they for the most part find themselves in actual historical settings, from 19th-century California to ancient Mesopotamia. How easy, or difficult, is it to fit your highly imaginative situations and self-willed characters within the restrictive framework of recorded history?

Baker: Usually not too difficult. People remain people, in any era. I did make a rule, when I began, that I would confine myself to actual events. It's painful to come up with what seems like a great idea built around a particular historical event, only to discover that the true facts won't accommodate my story. There's always a temptation to do what Michael Crichton did in The First Great Train Robbery and spin a delightful bit of airy persiflage out of a fairly sordid incident. I'd rather not, though. At the end of the day I'd rather work within the frame of real, not alternate, history.

In any case, if you just dig deeply enough, you can always find something amazing and true that makes a good story without adulteration. I then simply set it in the frame of a Company operation to give it additional context. If it's a good enough system for George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman), it's certainly good enough for me. Turning to specific parts of the Company saga now: The Life of the World to Come breaks with earlier volumes in being set mainly in the future, the very era (the 24 century) in which the Company—the mysterious Zeus Corporation—has its home. The 2300s in your scenario seem decadent, depleted, even posthistoric; plagues have decimated the population, and hyper-caution is the political rule. An unspecified doom looms in the year 2355. ... This is the outcome of a conspiracy millennia old. Is Earth's decline the prelude to an apocalyptic event, a temporal armageddon at series' end?

Baker: Oh, that would be telling! Consider, though, the pieces on the game board.

Labienus and his cabal of friends have been planning for centuries to seize power on the final day. To do this, they have to bring down not only their mortal masters, but at least two other cabals of immortals, to say nothing of the individual immortals who haven't built power bases of their own. Their weakness: arrogance and overconfidence. Aegeus and his cabal have also been making plans for centuries, ditto, ditto and ditto. Nominally served by Victor the Poisoner, who is actually a triple agent in the pay of Cabals A, B and C, C being:

Suleyman and his cabal, who have been more reactive, defensive, than the other two, and do actually care about the welfare of humanity and their fellow immortals. Their intelligence system is better. But are they ruthless enough to deal with the other two cabals? And what would they do upon discovering any evidence of betrayal by the mortal masters they have served? Which brings us to:

Mr. Bugleg, the Inklings Nouveau et al.: the mortals who, at least in name, run Dr. Zeus. Their opponents are superintelligent immortals who have had thousands of years to plan their doom. What have they got going for them? Only the fact that their opponents are not unified but deeply involved in cloak-and-dagger internecine plotting. And maybe one or two well-kept secrets they've had the sense to stash away somewhere. Meanwhile:

Homo umbratilis, the Little Stupid Guys, lurk about. Some of them were kidnapped and bred by Aegeus's cabal, to invent dreadful weapons. At least one was kidnapped by Labienus, for the same purpose. Some of them, at least, have remained free, and hate the immortals, and are not as stupid as the others. What are their powers? What's their agenda? And then we come to: Budu, or what's left of him, currently regenerating under a mountain in the company of his fellow Old Enforcers, watched over by Joseph. What is he planning to do when his recuperation is over? And finally:

Project Adonai, currently housed in the mortal flesh of Alec Checkerfield, who is finding his consciousness uncomfortably crowded by his two previous selves. All three could, perhaps, destroy the world, but they are presently in search of their unfortunate girlfriend, the Botanist Mendoza, assisted by a superpowerful artificial intelligence with the personality and morals of a pirate.

Heck of a lot of game pieces, isn't it? And those are only the ones you can see. But, in real history as well as my own little simulacrum of it, the Last Battle is never going to be a simple matter of dropping a ring down a volcano. With all due respect to my betters. Speaking of Alec Checkerfield, the protagonist of The Life of the World to Come: He's a genetic superman, created for reasons to do with complex intrigues within the Zeus Corporation. He's very talented, but also thoroughly flawed: a compulsive womanizer, and error-prone. He seems destined to cross paths time and again with that girlfriend of his, the rather intense Botanist Mendoza. Does the fraught, fragmented love story of Alec and Mendoza consciously amount to a revision and recomplication of the conventions of the romance genre?

Baker: Yes, in fact, it does. I was quite surprised to find that In the Garden of Iden was packaged as a romance novel in the U.K. Can't imagine what Georgette Heyer fans made of it. "Rather intense" is a polite term for Mendoza; brooding, miserable, misanthropic, perpetually stuck in the adolescent heartbreak of her first and only love affair. Alec is a brilliant, self-destructive fool. Would either of them know what to do with a happy ending, if they stumbled across one? Will True Love triumph? The England Alec inhabits is feeble and politically correct to a ruinous degree, even by 24th-century standards. Would it be fair to read in this a critique of Tony Blair's Britain?

Baker: Well, I do think it's awfully nice that Mr. Blair is continuing to be friends with we poor Yanks, in light of the peculiar odor emanating from the White House these days and the fact that he must have noticed that little 666 birthmark on Dubya's bald spot by now. As an American, I'm grateful to old Tony. As an interested observer of history, however, I feel like the little figure in Munch's The Scream.

In the ASBOS and the Sin Bins and the fact that the Briton is under more closed-circuit surveillance than any other citizen of any other country in the world, the Public Health Monitors of Alec's time are foreshadowed. Decent people are persuaded to agree to these institutions, with the promise that they'll only be used to punish yobs, nuisances, outsiders, others. But once the laws are in place and the powers are assumed ... who decides what constitutes an irritation to your neighbor? And in societies where people sign away civil liberties in trade for what they imagine will be safety ... it never ends in mutual respect, you may be sure. Surely someone over there realizes what's happening?

And why am I worrying about Britain? Because it takes my mind off worrying about my own country. And the less said about that, the better. Especially in these days of the Patriot Act. Your talent for farce is nicely displayed in the chapters of The Life of the World to Come devoted to the "Inklings Nouveau," a group of bumbling scholarly twits with an honorable literary pedigree. What inspired you to create Rutherford and Co.?

Baker: It's no fair mocking other people if I don't mock things dear to my own heart, so in the Inklings Nouveau I shot a few of my own sacred cows. I have lived most of my life in the Re-enactor and theater culture. Half my garments are costumes from other time periods. I own no furniture in a style more recent than 1920. I eat, drink and breathe the past, and moreover I'm part of a community of people who do likewise. We're those people in period costume you see when you visit historical places. We're extras in battle scenes in historical films. We hold Master and Commander parties. Elizabeth R parties. Topsy Turvy parties. We attend Gaskell balls. I won't say we're pathetic ... it's educational, after all, and actually rather glorious. But it can seem utterly ridiculous to an outsider.

So I lampooned Re-enactors. Also hobbit fanciers, gaming geeks, Anglophile Yanks and would-be wizards. One ethnic grouping that appears to retain a good deal of vigor in Alec's time is the Celts, in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere. Does this reflect ancestral loyalties of your own? And can more be expected of the Celts in the remaining Company novels?

Baker: Does it reflect ancestral loyalties of mine? Goodness, no. My ancestry is mixed Iroquois and French on my late dad's side, and my mother came from a fine old North Carolina family who proudly counted Hanging Judge Jeffreys among its notable forebears (well, OK, he was a Welshman). See above for my opinions on the Reinvented Celt ... which is not to say I don't have dear friends of the Hibernian persuasion. But some of them are stuck in, let's just say, destructive cultural patterns.

I did not make the Celtic Federation a comparatively vigorous group because of any perceived quality inherent in Celticism. It just seemed likely that, in the economic vacuum created by big nations' political correctness, smaller nations could make fortunes by supplying all those prohibited substances like cheese, coffee and wine. A certain sense of spite might motivate them, as well.

Some of the action in the final book takes place in a Celtic Federation country, I will say that much. It's interesting to observe the crossover in The Life of the World to Come with your popular novella The Empress of Mars. Does Empress form an integral part of the Company plot arc? And are you thinking of revisiting the Mars of Empress in future works?

Baker: Originally I wrote the Empress story to provide some context for when Mars Two is destroyed in The Life. In Life (which was written before 9/11, by the way) a fairly naive bunch of young intellectuals decide to fight injustice wherever they find it. Ultimately they end up smuggling weapons to a political group on Mars, with horrific consequences.

There is a fatal disconnect, in idealists who are willing to fight and die for a cause: The people they kill are never fellow creatures, only abstract concepts of evil. De-humanized things. It's convenient, acts like anesthesia. I wanted to break that disconnect, to make what happens on Mars as emotionally dreadful for the reader as it is for the survivors of the act. So I wrote a history for the city that gets destroyed, I invented a culture and characters and gave them families and lives and dreams. The reader of the whole work should feel what is lost in Mars Two, ideally. It seemed morally necessary to make it sting.

I have already returned to the Mars of Empress, in fact. Gardner Dozois will be publishing a novella titled Where the Golden Apples Grow in the forthcoming YA anthology Escape from Earth. It's set about 15 years after the events in Empress. I'm currently working on a story set a little earlier, called "Maelstrom," and have another one blocked out as well. The most recent Company book, The Children of the Company, is a "fix-up," an assemblage of already-published stories and new linking material into an episodic novel. The connecting figure is Labienus, your darkest villain, a plotter across thousands of years of history. How readily were you able to get inside the head of such a truly nasty character? And is Labienus in part a music-hall or stage villain—preposterous, the natural object of your reader's laughter?

Baker: What motivates Labienus is fairly simple. Nearly every child or adolescent goes through a period in which they loathe their families. They may fantasize that they're adopted; they may daydream about glamorous lives with no connection to the reality they find detestable. The Harry Potter books make use of this to a certain extent, as did the first Matrix film and most vampire novels. "I don't belong here with these awful people; I have this wonderful other family, who are my real family. Not only that, I'm a Chosen One with super powers and an awesome destiny."

The Company makes use of this cultural myth in training its little cyborg recruits. Some, like Joseph, never really buy into it. Some, like Mendoza, believe it and then break when they discover they're still human. Labienus, though, utterly accepts it and as a consequence is emotionally frozen at that stage of development. So he has an adolescent's fastidious horror of mortal life's unsavory realities. He has an adolescent's vanity and lack of compassion or conscience. He can giggle at human suffering because it doesn't touch him. He finds his wickedness amusing, in a cynical way, and indulges himself in pretended sentimentality. The only mortal he ever makes any emotional connection with, he sees as a mirror image of himself.

Some of the other immortals who have gone wrong—like Mother Aegypt—have done so because they've broken under the weight of self-loathing and sorrow. Mendoza very nearly goes that way. But Labienus' humor and zest for life are completely intact. His villainy is a gleeful game, with absurd cartoon flourishes. Not so much music-hall villain as Richard III in that respect, but he will never have that moment of conscience, those nightmares, that cause him to collapse at last. A more sober and complex figure in Children of the Company is Victor the Poisoner, evil in his actions through the machinations of others. Does Victor represent in some way historical causality itself, its moral ambiguity and susceptibility to covert manipulation?

Baker: To a certain extent. He also represents the moral dilemma faced by those who serve as the agents of manipulation. There is a point at which certain men disengage their consciences, fully expecting that there will come a time when they can switch them back on, and enjoy the end that justified the means. But as time drags on, they realize that day will never come. The end for which they bargained their self-respect away is an illusion. At the core of Children of the Company is the remarkable novella "Son Observe the Time," dealing with the San Francisco quake of 1906. Your re-creation of the city at that time is splendidly achieved. How were you able to capture its essence so vividly and completely?

Baker: Thank you! Hard footwork in part, poring over microfilm records in the research department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and in the main library in San Francisco itself. The Sanborn Fire Insurance city maps, made just prior to the earthquake, were particularly helpful, as were copies of both the Chronicle and the Examiner.

Primary sources provide the best sense of the past. Nobody's picking and choosing what you see; it's all laid out before you, momentous incidents and trivial details jumbled together, and sometimes the trivial bits will tell you more about the event than the history-book facts. I will always be haunted by the announcement of the Masked Ball on Roller Skates held at the Mechanic's Pavilion on the night of April 17, 1906. Twelve hours after the ball ended, the Mechanic's Pavilion was being used as a triage hospital. As the flames advanced and it became evident the Pavilion would burn, the doctors worked frantically to load those likeliest to survive into wagons. But there weren't enough wagons. Those remaining behind begged not to be left to the fire, so the doctors and the Marines worked their way along the rows of patients who couldn't be evacuated, chloroforming and then shooting them. From fancy dress on skates to that, in 24 hours ...

The Great Quake was such a traumatic event, I think a lot of Californians carry its memory in their DNA. The first time I ever saw San Francisco, 1906 was only 50 years in the past. My father took me to Cliff House, and to Sutro's Baths, and Chinatown. I remember clinging tight to his hand as we walked past Lotta's Fountain and he told me how, after the quake, people used the fountain as a place to post notices asking after those who were still missing. I thought about that, many years later, when I saw the notice boards in the Manhattan subway stations, covered with snapshots and pleas for any information on missing fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. A quite recent Company novella, "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst," as yet uncollected, depicts William Randolph Hearst's recruitment into Company ranks after his historically recorded "death." Plenty of shades of Citizen Kane here. ... Will Hearst feature in further stories?

Baker: He features in the final book. He's too good a character not to use. In a lot of ways, the perfect symbol of America for his time.

He wasn't nearly so bad as he's been painted, when you actually sift down to the facts about the man. He did not start the Spanish-American War; he did not murder Thomas Ince. He did not invent yellow journalism, at least no more so than Pulitzer or the other newspaper editors of the day. He had a great deal more money and power than anyone should, of course, and the terrible kind of innocence that goes with that. But Citizen Kane is very much more a study of Orson Welles than of Hearst himself. You have a new collection coming later this year from Night Shade Books: Dark Mondays. The title story is an original novella, isn't it, about pirates? Does it fit into the Company sequence?

Baker: Dark Mondays is the title of the collection as a whole; there is no story by that name. The centerpiece of the collection, though, is a novella about Sir Henry Morgan's sack of Panama in 1671. It's called "The Maid on the Shore." It's nearly straight historical fiction, with only one fantastical element. After so cavalierly lifting the persona of the guy on the rum bottle for Alec Checkerfield's AI, I thought it would be only fair to resurrect his original in a story of his own.

There are no Company stories in Dark Mondays. All are freestanding horror and/or fantasy; some have in common that they are set in a seaside California town, similar to the one in which I live. The collection as a whole is something of a salute to Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson and Richard Matheson, the great Twilight Zone storytellers. Your 2003 novel, The Anvil of the World, is a full-blooded, extremely robust fantasy, about the adventures of a former assassin in a besieged caravan, in the hotel trade and elsewhere. When did you first dream up the imaginary world portrayed in Anvil? And were you influenced at all by Jack Vance in the rambunctious humor omnipresent in the book?

Baker: Not Jack Vance, no. Fritz Leiber, somewhat, a little L. Sprague de Camp, and Thorne Smith particularly. Anvil of the World is drawn from an enormous fantasy universe I started creating when I was about 12. All sorts of things got woven into it over the ensuing 40 years. It's immense, with centuries of history, geography, natural history, flora and fauna, languages. I retold it in epic-blank-verse style when I was in my 20s, and later did a sort of illuminated-manuscript version with illustrations in ink and watercolor. I worked it into my first novel, as a story that one character tells to another character. It notably failed to interest any publishers.

But I was thumbing through the rejected manuscript in a disgruntled sort of way, one afternoon, when my agent asked me if I could come up with a short fantasy story. I adapted one episode, which became "Desolation Rose." It was printed in a tiny little experimental-format venue and was read by about one person, but fortunately that one was Gardner Dozois. He expressed an interest in it, so I wrote an entirely new piece set in my old universe, with some new characters, and it became "The Caravan From Troon." Which, in turn, became the first part of the triptych that makes up Anvil of the World. A striking motif of Anvil is the demonic family of which the rascally Lord Ermenwyr is but one scion out of many: His parents are a Dark Lord and a Lady of healing and life. Is this comic marriage of good and evil your way of rebutting the simplistic moral template of Tolkienian fantasy, its predictable opposition of "light" and "darkness"?

Baker: On one level, absolutely yes. And don't let's forget George Lucas! There are in real life no swarthy orcs or Calormenes, no armored stormtroopers that we can mow down in droves and it's OK 'cause they're Ultimate Evil and we're Good. Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis knew this really, and Lewis did make an effort to show his Calormenes weren't all bad. Some of Tolkien's orc captains sound a lot like Regular Army sergeants; the fighting Uruk-hai are his best villains, I think.

It's also drawing on the modern Neopagan construct of a dual divinity, a Lady of Life and a Lord of Death. I have always wondered how a marriage like that worked. It can't be an absolute good-evil kind of thing at all. There must be days when the Blessed Lady's out of sorts and is a bit too exacting with Her disciples about scrubbing out the sink in the stillroom. There must be occasions when the Dark Guy takes His children to the seaside and buys them ice cream. Are you planning sequels to Anvil of the World, perhaps after you complete the Company series?

Baker: Not sequels, no; but other books set in that universe, certainly. No more eight-book story arcs. ... At the moment I've got a book begun with the working title of The House of the Stag, which details the youth of Lord Ermenwyr's father, and how he got into the Dark Lord business. Amongst other things. It promises to be rather substantial.