This collection of short stories about Company operators is a good palate-teaser while waiting. I think the stories would be good if I hadn't read the novels; those written from the POV of an outsider might be even more eerie. If you like SF, and haven't read her books, and happen across this book, please read the last story - the Hotel at Harlan's Landing - first; then maybe The Wreck of the Gladstone and Smart Alec, and then tell me what you thought.
The Literary Agent is mostly an argument with Robert Louis Stevenson about the ethics of writing adventure stories. It's a good thing the dialogue is so snappy, or it would have been too distracting to apply Stevenson-the-writer's arguments against writing compelling villains to Baker-the-writer's own stories.¹ I can't remember if Milton ever wrote anything implying that he knew he had done the same.
A side comment: the hardcover, published by Golden Gryphon, is physically very nice. There is real cloth in the binding and the pages are folded into signatures; it's much more solid than mass-market 'hardbacks'. I would take this as a hopeful sign that binding standards were going up, but according to the colophon, three thousand copies were printed by this manufacturer. That seems very low, as does the $25 price, if underdown is right. This is a labor of love? No-one made any money on it? Odd. I don't see why the economies of scale, for both the seller and the reader, don't put bestsellers in sturdy bindings and obscure books in fragile ones. (Bestsellers get loaned out a lot, among me & mine, although I suppose we don't destroy them often enough to really justify extra solidity: the imitation sturdy binding is a faint excuse for what's actually demand pricing.)
¹Baker's plotters, the ones with all the Machiavellian charm, are coerced into many of their awful acts by even worse villains. These really bad ones aren't compelling in their turn because they are terribly cowardly and stupid; they're dangerous enough to (possibly) justify the charming villains' acts of lesser evil because they are our far future, and have inherited stupendously powerful technology. This is a good first solution to the problem.
I'm not sure how it holds up under examination, because the intermediate villains - and the really interesting characters who may or may not descend into efficient heartlessness - are so powerful that it seems unlikely they aren't partly responsible for the collapse of the future society. This may be exactly where Baker is heading, in the many adumbrated plots, but if so our villains are real villains after all.
Maybe she just doesn't agree with her version of Stevenson. Maybe she does agree, but thinks anything else makes a dull book.
So wrote clew in
SF&F.