Kage Baker Bundle
By Kage Baker
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REVIEW BY JOHN MESSER
Online publisher Fictionwise has scored a coup with the Kage Baker Bundle, which includes 10 short pieces by the popular science fiction master. The collection is notable for a number of reasons. First, it includes four original stories and allows readers to peruse installments from two earlier series. Second, the selection reveals not only the author's intuitive sense for imaginative science fiction and fantasy, but also her sensitivity to the problems of daily life. Kage includes original works from the series featuring the Temporal Displacement Unit. And like the government's general information center, Kage's fictional company is located in Pueblo, Colorado, where it works to provide responses in time-altering spheres. Readers can sympathize with the old veteran trying to control a mysterious problem with his corn in Pueblo, Colorado Has the Answers. In Two Old Men, an absorbing 20-minute tale, a frightened boy carries allegorical messages between two cynical elders. Also original, Miss Yahoo Has Her Say returns readers to the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver in the land where horses are the masters, while How They Tried to Talk Indian Tony Down describes two spinsters' efforts to retrieve a former shaman who has been treed by visions from his past. Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast forms the backdrop for Katherine's Story, the sad tale of a young newlywed's transition from a loving New York family to hardscrabble Appalachian poverty and a damaged baby. The collection also includes four stories from the Immortals series that first appeared in Science Fiction magazine in 1997. You can read the first four installments in the series about Immortals of Dr. Zeus, Inc., a for-profit company that routinely gives eternal life to mortals and dispatches them on historic salvage missions. Immortal Joseph is directed to assist in the collection of a hallucinogenic root in Noble Mold, and Immortal Kalugin is tasked to assist in the recovery of a masterpiece painting lost in the sinking of a yacht in The Wreck of the Gladstone. Finally, readers are offered two other "The Company" episodes, The Fourth Branch and Facts Relating to the Arrest of Dr. Kalugin, the first of the series. First time Fictionwise readers will appreciate such user-friendly features as estimated reading times (stories vary from 10-45 minutes), easily accessible page locations and a variety of download formats. Kage Baker Bundle successfully brings together classics and newly commissioned works that demonstrate the full range of her vivid imagination. Together these stories take science fiction devotees back to some of the best work by a master storyteller and offer a great introduction for those with less exposure to this singularly creative literary form. John Messer writes from Ludington, Michigan.
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