04 July 2006

James Patrick Baen -- October 22, 1943 - June 28, 2006

Here it is, the Fourth of July, nearly a week since I heard the news. It's wrong that Jim isn't here for the Fourth. He loved this country, truly supported our troops by sending out thousands of free books, and knew from personal experience that the American Dream is real, that it takes not government handouts, "a village," or anything but courage and hard work to turn opportunity into success. And even as I say it's wrong that he's not here today, I still can't quite believe he's really gone.

So here I sit, wondering (as I have been for nearly a week!) how to sum up eight years of knowing someone as mentor, friend, father figure, and -- finally, dream come true! -- publisher. For the two-and-a-half weeks he lay unconscious after his stroke, I kept getting flashes of an old western song: "Jim, Jim, you're riding on ahead. Oh, Jim, Jim...." Was that something telling me he wasn't going to make it?

Jim would call that "barf on a stick" as he did with all esper/psi stuff. It's one of the subjects Jim and I had to agree to disagree on. He said that all examples were empirical. Unprovable. That when I could provide reproducible, falsible evidence that ESP existed, he'd change his mind.

Now when I'm trying to figure out what to say, my mind is filking "To Sir, With Love," giving me lines like: "How do I thank someone who has taken me from rejections to reviews? Taught me how to write from wrong, weak prose from strong -- that's a lot to learn..."

Okay, a lot of actually getting published came from Eric Flint, but he admits that a lot of what he says is just repeating what Jim told him. I wish I still had all the posts and emails from Jim way back in the shadowed, misty past of Baen's Bar, when he could read stories posted for criticism. Before greedy buttheads and their lawyers concocting suits slammed the door on that. Before my hard drive crashed and sent it all into the limbo of lost electrons and jumbled magnetic imprints.

There are still imprints, just not magnetic. Electro-chemical, I guess:
Dialect is like a strong spice; a little goes a long way.
Don't encrypt manuscripts by using unpronounceable names. (Jim having spent his Army time as a ditty-chaser (morse code catcher, for non-military types), I see where that wording came from.)
Give readers the proper cues in format and narrative and they'll follow along, happily falling into reader trance, no matter what sort of strange world you're taking them through.
Don't explain. Give enough information for the reader to follow the story, but any bread-crumb trail is a promise to the reader that more info is coming, further along.

There's more. A lot more.

Jim's importance went beyond SF. Beyond publishing. He saw new things and embraced them instead of fearing them. The internet -- that amorphous, uncontrolled frontier of information exchange that terrifies most all other purveyors of intellectual properties -- to him was a gateway to opportunity. He pounced on it, developed a presence there, created a community of readers and authors like nothing else on the internet or off of it.

He saw readers as partners in the publishing business, not as marks to be exploited and thieves to be thwarted. He was honest and figured that most other people were, too. He paid his authors and figured that the readers also wanted them paid, so they would keep turning out new books for the readers' enjoyment.

Go to the Bar. Read the memories in Waiting Room and In Memoriam. Maybe you'll get an inkling of why I invested 8 years of my life in the place, and why I'm sitting here typing with tears in my eyes and a hole in my heart for someone I met in person exactly one time. Someone who, early on, told me shape up or he'd personally boot my ass off the Bar.

I shaped up. It was worth it to stay there. It got even better, as I watched Jim turn his publishing house into something that existed nowhere else -- a successful electronic publishing house -- and all of it through discussion of ideas with the webmaster, the authors, and the readers who would buy the product.

I think we surprised even him, though, when the consensus came down to increase the price of Webscriptions by 50%, so the authors would get about the same from a sale there as from a paperback. Who came up with that idea? The readers who bought only the electronic editions. They didn't want the authors shorted on royalties.

Jim was both miserly with his time, and generous beyond belief. Every one of us knew that we could pitch an idea to him, and he'd consider it. Even if he said no, he'd consider it.

There was no ivory tower. No stern, forbidding corporate fortress. Just a little round man with a white beard and twinkling eyes sitting at the head of the table, with all of us playing, discussing the latest books, and tossing ideas back and forth. Sometimes he smacked us for being unruly. Sometimes some of us returned the favor when he threw a snit. He flirted outrageously, went walking with baensidhe in the garden, and got surprised by a gold-painted Coyote in a plot to get more snippets. When he wasn't finding or inventing new book-crack to feed our habits, he'd be in the middle of arguments about science and politics, throwing a pie in a virtual foodfight, or dropping into a pun war with something so hideous we all held our noses and ran screaming.

It was grand and glorious and fun.

Then the chair at the head of the table was empty.

And so were we.



Jim,

Thank you for being where you were when you were, with a door sitting open and an invite to come in, set a spell, put my feet up and enjoy the conversation. I might not be around today if I hadn't found the Bar when I did.

Thank you for all the books, the ideas, the friends that I found there.

Thank you for the encouragement, corrections, sledgehammers to the head and boots to the ass that took me from a blindly groping wannabe to a published author.

Thank you for being you.

::Grabs a drink, steps up to the line::

To Jim! The boat has come to the dock, and Bob, Poul, and all the others are waiting at the gangplank for the new passenger.

::drinks::

::throws the glass, spraying shards all over the fireplace::


Now I'm getting snips from the title song of "Firefly." Where did that come from? "Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand. (something something) I'm still free. You can't take the sky from me...."

Now it's segued into "Beyond Antares," the song that Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) sang a couple of times in "Star Trek."

Maybe that's what it is. Maybe it's another bit of "barf on a stick" telling me that when we get beyond Antares -- or maybe just to a new horizon in technology -- someone there will get a flash of twinkling eyes, a hearty laugh, "Told ya so!" and want to keep going. To find out what is beyond. To boldly go where everyone has been afraid to go, before, because they'll know that someone has already been there.

And wasn't afraid.

Happy Fourth of July, Jim. Enjoy the parades and fireworks.

We'll do what we have to to keep the home fires burning without you, and continue launching rockets up the asses of the DRM fanatics.


Remembrances of Jim's life will be held at Trinoc*Con in Raleigh, NC Saturday, July 22 and Lacon IV, the Worldcon, in Los Angeles, CA in August. The organizers of Dragon*Con, Atlanta, GA on Labor Day weekend, have also set aside a time block for it.

In lieu of flowers, etc., Jim's surviving partners and family ask that you buy a copy of The World Turned Upside Down and give it to a teenager or donate it to a library in his memory.

Links:
John Ringo
Banana Slug
Quilly Mammoth
Sea Wasp
Brown Kitty
capriciouspixi
Hal G.P. Colebatch in American Spectator

Photo by David Drake, December, 2000, at Jim's computer upstairs of the staff workspace in Rollsville.