skygiants

While I'm talking about movies, I should also mention that I followed up my recent Kage Baker binge by finally reading her Ancient Rockets, a collection of her Tor.com blog posts about early silent science fiction and fantasy films.

I love it every time Kage Baker tangents her characters off into a discussion of old film in the Company books, so I expected this to be a good time and also provide me with a list of silent films that I would like very much to seek out, and it delivered on both these fronts. The funniest section was probably her tour through Frank Baum's apparently-largely-incomprehensible early silent Oz films (pantomime animals galore!). I don't particularly feel the need to watch them but I'm so glad to know they exist. I do however very much feel the need to watch The Man from Beyond, in which Harry Houdini plays a sailor who gets frozen in ice for 100 years; Aelita: Queen of Mars, in which a Soviet engineer leads a lunar worker's revolution after the titular queen of Mars falls in love with him; and Der müde Tod, in which a woman's husband is abducted by Death and she has to attempt to derail three other tragic romances across time and space if she's going to rescue him.

Kage Baker is a very entertaining writer who clearly loved these films and loved having the opportunity to talk about them, and, as is often the case, it's a pleasure to follow along with her genuine enthusiasm. (Poor

genarti was very patient about my tendency over the course of the two days I was reading this book to burst into sudden laughter and then pass her my e-reader to force her to look at a paragraph.) Occasionally her style does veer into a moderately condescending Listen Up Youths territory, with some light Orientalism apologia; on the one hand Kage Baker wrote most of these essays as a distraction while dying of cancer so I don't really feel like I can hold it against her when she's being condescending, and on the other hand I do think she probably was also just like that. Odds are good that she would have been profoundly insufferable on Twitter if she'd ever made it on there. I am profoundly sorry, as always, that she never got the chance.