Books by Kage Baker

Created by Chip Zdarsky and Ramâon K Perez.

Spans a range of epic interstellar adventure stories told against a limitless cosmos filled with exotic aliens, heroic characters, and incredible settings.

Before the Riders came to their remote valley the Yendri led a tranquil pastoral life. When the Riders conquered and enslaved them, only a few escaped to the forests. Only one possessed the necessary rage to fight back: Gard, the half-demon foundling, who began a one-man guerrilla war against the Riders.

In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life. It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company. One of these is Mendoza, the botanist, who is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden.

The Anvil of the World is the tale of Smith and his feud-prone people, the Children of the Sun. Smith, formerly a successful assassin, is trying to retire, hoping to live an honest life in obscurity in spite of all those who have sworn to kill him. But when he agrees to be the master of a caravan from traveling from the inland city of Troon to Salesh by the sea, trouble follows. As always, Baker's approach is charmingly distinctive. Smith's adventure is certainly the only fantasy featuring a white-uniformed nurse, gourmet cuisine, one hundred and forty-four glass butterflies, and a steamboat.

Dedicated to saving the future by preserving the past, the cyborgs of The Dr. Zeus Company now wonder if they must save themselves. In this fourth book in the Company series, Baker once again takes readers on a wry, intelligent, and absorbing journey into the future and the past.

These eight stories, reprinted for the first time in this collection, delve further into the history and exploits of the Company. The book opens with the novella, "To the Land Beyond the Sunset," starring Lewis and Mendoza, and involving a strange tribe in Bolivia whose members claim to be gods. "Standing in His Light" features Van Drouten's role in the career of the artist Jan Vermeer. Other stories include "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst," which opens up intriguing questions about The Company, and the original novelette, "Hellfire at Twilight," which concludes the volume and tells of Lewis infiltrating the famous Hellfire Club in eighteenth century England. Gods and Pawns is a compelling read for every Baker fan, and essential for Company addicts.

Facilitator Joseph has outlasted entire civilizations during his twenty-thousand years of service to Dr Zeus, the twenty-fourth century Company that created immortal operatives like him to preserve history and culture. The year is 1699 and Joseph is now in Alta California, to imitate an ancient Native-American Coyote god.

In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life-for profit, of course. It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr Zeus. One of these is Mendoza, the botanist. The death of her lover has been followed by centuries of heartbreak.