Posted on June 29th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Science Fiction.
Jim Baen was a complicated man. I worked for him for a while, and I appreciate the employment he gave me at a time when I badly needed it; he was, on the whole, a reasonable and pleasant man to work for.
I just wanted to note, briefly, that Baen's place in science fiction was easy to summarize incompletely, and that this was regularly done not just by his detractors -- and he did publish some authors whose worldviews ranged (for me) from simpleminded to revolting -- but also by his advocates and fellow-travelers. Certainly, Baen represented the harder sf side of things, and the libertarian bent, and the individualist. But he often took these things, well, more seriously than others. For example, he was one of Joanna Russ's publishers, and when he was the editor of Galaxy, he serialized We Who Are About To... -- a novel that was a response to Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet and similar Lost Humans Who Must Re-establish Civilization stories, except in this one the protagonist understands that her place in the new heirarchy is to breed and be used until they all die (because the planet is truly inimical to them); instead she kills everyone and spends the last half of the book having reveries while she dies. It is one of the most controversial and misunderstood books in science fiction history, a book that was vilified by the conservative side of science fiction, and received a juvenile, fatheaded dismissive review from Spider Robinson, who (along with many others) described it as a book about a "coward". Why did Jim Baen publish it? My guess is that he saw that it was a strong individualist statement, and that was more important than whether it was a nasty feminist book or a book that criticised the politics of other books he liked. He also published a definitive edition of the Alyx stories, incorporating Picnic on Paradise, another mercilessly grim lost-people book that is one of the most wonderfully written books the field has ever seen, every page a stylistic delight.
Anyway, I don't have any way to wrap this up, really. Jim Baen was a complex figure, and I suspect the obituaries are going to reduce him more than obituaries usually do: especially those that praise him. He is a real loss, not just to traditional science fiction but to the field.
0 comments.
Comments can contain some xhtml. Names and emails are appreciated but not required (emails aren't displayed).