Who Goes There?

Kage Baker would no doubt still be writing and garnering acclaim today, had she not died of cancer back in 2010. She was born in 1952 and grew up in Hollywood, so it makes sense that the world of acting, both on stage and in the movies, would interest her. She spent the last year of her life trying (and sadly failing) to finish a novel while also watching and writing reviews for a lot of films from the silent era. We even got a book of these reviews published after Baker’s death, Ancient Rockets: Treasures and Trainwrecks of the Silent Screen. As for writing genre fiction, Baker came to it rather late in life, when she was in her forties (this is a lesson that it’s not too late to try your hand at pursuing such a career), but she hit the ground running with a ton of short stories, novellas, and novels. For the dozen or so years that she spent as a writer, she worked on a few series, most prolifically (it was probably her favorite) the episodic series about The Company, a far-future league of time-traveling cyborgs. In this series there is history as we know it, and then there’s a second history, a secret history, in which these time-traveling agents meddle, and this is where the fun happens. “Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst” is an entertaining, if also slight, tale of mystery and old Hollywood intrigue, involving one of the more infamous American figures from the early 20th century: William Randolph Hearst.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October-November 2003 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and the Baker collections Gods and Pawns and The Best of Kage Baker.

Enhancing Image

We start in the year 1926, on the set of a real movie called The Son of the Sheik (it’s the sequel to The Sheik, go figure), with Rudolph Valentino. We’re told this scene from the viewpoint of Lewis, who is Valentino’s stunt double for the film, although he’s actually an 800-year-old cyborg working for The Company. Lewis asks Valentino for his autograph and somehow pulls out a copy of the shooting script for the film, which Valentino signs. Baker doesn’t tell us the significance of this interaction right away, but the autographed script copy will become a McGuffin for later in the novella. Valentino will, of course, die tragically in a number of weeks, The Son of the Sheik being his final role, while Lewis will live—well, who knows how many more years or decades? Lewis is an “immortal,” which does not literally mean he will live forever (he will surely die at some point), but that he lives an astoundingly long amount of time, being immune to the usual natural causes. Old age, hunger, and disease are not concerns of his. The same goes for Joseph, fellow “immortal” and narrator of this story. Joseph only makes us aware of his presence at the very end of the prologue, but he’s gonna be the protagonist from here on out. The main action sees us jumping from 1926 to 1933, which sees a radical change having come over Hollywood and America at large. The Great Depression has hit the country, talkies have completely supplanted the silent pictures, Prohibition has ended, and Rudolph Valentino has been dead for some years now.

Ah, but William Randolph Hearst is still alive! Born in 1863, Hearst grew up to become the head of a media empire which continues to this day, in large part helped by his father George being a politician and gold-miner. (It’s said that money doesn’t grow on trees, and similarly that wealth typically must come from somewhere.) Hearst is partly responsible (for better or worse) for journalism as we now understand it. For Hearst there is objectively true news, and then there’s news which strikes the reader or viewer as true, even if it’s not based in reality. Indeed we can thank William Randolph Hearst for the concept of “fake news,” even if the phrase had not been coined yet in his lifetime. In the world of Baker’s story, Hearst had just turned seventy, and for being an old man (especially for the time) he was still spritely—with a sort of fiendish cunning. This is a fact that really should’ve been on Joseph’s mind as he and Lewis stay at Hearst’s famous mansion, under the pretense of having been recommended to Hearst by George Bernard Shaw. Joseph and Lewis are very old (Joseph being over 2,000 years old, in fact), but appear and even seem to think like young men. These are not people whose minds have been profoundly wearied by the passing of centuries, having experienced first-hand the ups and downs of multiple civilizations, which implies that there might be a ceiling for mental maturity. Of course, you and I know that old people, in the real world, have a funny tendency to act and think in childish ways, as if their minds had, at some point, boomeranged back into the stubbornness and shortsightedness associated with adolescence. Hearst himself is not quite an exception to this.

So, what’s the plan? The idea if twofold, firstly that Joseph is to make a deal with Hearst about his estate being used as a safe haven for certain precious artifacts, which are to be “discovered” a few centuries hence. In particular there’s the question of a copy of the script for The Son of the Sheik, signed by Valentino himself, which the Hearst estate is supposed to guard for safe keeping, so that it may be eventually sold at auction for an insane amount of money. Time, according to the immortals, is something which cannot be defied; once something has happened, it can’t be undone. The signed script must be found in the Hearst estate at such a time, and Hearst himself must die in 1951, at the impressive old age of 88. The problem, naturally, is that for someone like Hearst “just” living to an old age is not enough: he wants what the immortals have. It’s a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation, because in order to convince Hearst of the immortals’ plan, they have to let him in on at least some of the truth (but not all of it) as to why they’re at his mansion. Mind you that this is like if time-traveling agents went to that bald fuck Jeff Bezos to do some business for them. If there’s a theme in “Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst” it’s the malleability and to some extent the unknowability of “the truth.” What is the difference between what really happened and what appears to have happened? This is an appropriate theme to explore using one of the most infamous figures in the history of journalism, although I don’t think Baker explores it as well as she could’ve. It could’ve worked well as a short story or a novelette, but this is a novella, which means there’s some fat.

There are a few supporting characters, at least some of whom are real people from history, such as Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress. There’s also Greta Garbo, although if I recall correctly (and in keeping with her reputation) we never get even a line of dialogue from here. We even get a cameo from Clark Gable, one year away from starring in It Happened One Night. There’s Constance Talmadge, who had played “the Mountain Girl in Intolerance.” But the most important player here is Cartimandua Bryce, who seems to be a character Baker invented—her and her two fucking dogs, named Conqueror Worm (yeah) and Tcho-Tcho. Mrs. Bryce is a very superstitious and gossipy woman, and also a fascist sympathizer, complimenting Hitler and Mussolini while calling FDR “a young soul, blundering perhaps as it finds its way.” She is not a good person. She also throws a wrench into Joseph and Lewis’s plan and pads out the story’s length a fair deal. Said plan goes amiss when the Valentino-signed script goes missing, despite presumably nobody else at the party knowing about it. There’s also the issue of Joseph having to lie to Hearst about the possibility of becoming an immortal in order to placate him, although he does tell a lot more of the truth about the Company than people of the past are meant to know. It’s true, for one, that while the Company does have many agents, it’s still not omniscient with regards to history: there are little pockets (you might call them dead zones) in history as we know it where there’s flexibility as to what can happen. History as a whole is predestined, but there are exceptions. William Randolph Hearst, in this particular way, may be an exception.

There Be Spoilers Here

The mystery regarding the Valentino script basically resolves itself, which is anti-climactic, as if the story turns into a mystery (we even get shoutouts to Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett) and then quickly gets bored with it because it’s pretty obvious right away who the culprit is. Mrs. Bryce is, like I said, a huge gossip and much interested in scandalous material. While she doesn’t receive so much as a slap on the wrist for her misdeed, she does lose one of the dogs, which gets a fatal taste of Joseph’s boot (in fairness, Joseph was acting in self-defense). Our Heroes™ conspire to make the dog’s death look like it had died of natural causes, with Mrs. Bryce ultimately buys. Things are tied up neatly on that front—maybe too neatly. The thread regarding Hearst himself is more intriguing and does take advantage of the SFnal premise, but it’s also a lot messier. Unbeknownst to everyone except for Joseph when he makes the discovery, a secret that know even Hearst is aware of, the old man is a genetic anomaly. Joseph had been bullshitting Hearst about becoming an immortal, with a mixture of half-truths and outright lies, but in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy this deal becomes true, quite unwittingly on Joseph’s part. The ramifications of Hearst not only being exposed to how news is conveyed to the masses in the far future but actually living to witness that point in time are… a bit ominous. The mission is a success, but maybe it should’ve failed.

A Step Farther Out

This story appeals to me to an extent, since like Baker I’m a film buff, although I don’t know that much about the pre-Hays Code years. I’ve never seen a Rudolph Valentino movie, although I do know enough about his story (Valentino was one of Hollywood’s first major tragedies) to get the importannce of what Baker does here. My major issue, aside from the length and uneven pacing, is that Baker can’t quite decide how seriously she wants to treat this material. There’s some comic relief, but the point that Baker wants to make about people like Hearst is very serious. I wouldn’t call it satirical, because it doesn’t go that far, but it does rag on a fact about journalism which, sadly, remains true. On a final note, I do appreciate that Baker sets the action at a point in time where she doesn’t feel tempted to reference the Citizen Kane controversy. If you’re a film buff (and certainly Baker knew about it) then you probably know about Hearst’s relationship with that movie.

See you next time.