Author: katenepveu

Well, I’ve finished Kage Baker’s Company series with The Sons of Heaven. What can I say about it outside of spoiler protection?

• I really, really hate what happens with Mendoza. Only having read nine prior books kept me reading past chapter 7.
• Unfortunately a lot of the resolution of the overall plot depends on Mendoza’s thread, and so it’s hard for me to decide whether I find the conclusion satisfactory. Certain elements of it, sure, but overall? Can’t really say.
• Similarly, there are a lot of players to keep track of by this point, and the book spends a lot of time shifting among them. I think some of them might deserve more time, and a late addition was gratuitous, but again, can’t really say.
• Though I’m pretty sure that all of the major questions get answered in terms of what happens to everyone and so on.
• As someone who is (1) an adopted child and (2) 39 weeks pregnant, I find the attitude the novel takes toward children really very peculiar indeed.

Thus, between the pacing issues I’ve been mentioning and the serious problems I had with this book, I can’t recommend the series. But a quick look around the Internet suggests that most people’s reactions were far more positive than mine, so, well, who knows?

A spoiler post follows.

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This post contains BOOK-DESTROYING SPOILERS for Kage Baker’s The Machine’s Child. Here’s the non-spoiler post.

Continue reading “Baker, Kage: (07) The Machine’s Child (spoilers)”

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I’d meant to take a break from Kage Baker’s Company series to read the new Temeraire novel, but I’d mistakenly left that at work on a day that I found myself needing reading material. So, The Machine’s Child it was.

There’s very little I can say about this that isn’t a spoiler. Plot ahoy, yes: though not quite to the pace of The Graveyard Game, the book still picks up most of the threads left hanging before the detour into short stories. But I’m apprehensive about the direction the series could be going, which leaves me unable to really evaluate this book on its own.

A spoiler post follows.

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The Children of the Company is nominally the sixth Company novel, but as I said before, is actually a fixup. This is annoying on two levels. First, there’s basically no movement in the overall plot, as all the stories take place before the end of The Life of the World to Come. Second, the fixup uses the framing device of Labienus reviewing documents and reflecting on his career: but I do not actually believe that a number of the stories would have been committed to paper. In particular, I’ll believe Victor’s first-person narration in a standalone story with no explicit framing device, but I refuse to believe that he would be so foolish as to keep a diary.

To the extent this book has an arc, it’s mostly Victor’s, which I enjoyed. (And I see that when I first read “Son Observe the Time,” I missed a small gesture toward my issues with the “recorded history can’t be changed” axiom.) We also are given a sense of Labienus’s personality (he has been briefly mentioned in prior books), which worked less well for me because I don’t find him as interesting, and see Latif and Kalugin again. There’s also another story with Kiu, introduced in Black Projects, White Knights, and may I take this opportunity to say that I regret that the only character with Asian ancestry is a Dragon Lady? And there is a very brief mention of a completely new character in the Epilogue, of all places, which puzzles me to no end—presumably this will be significant, but surely there was a smoother way to manage that introduction?

On the whole, I would have preferred that this were a collection rather than a fixup, because the seams and lack of coherence are distracting.

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I am not sure that there is anything objectively wrong The Life of the World to Come, the fifth book in Kage Baker’s Company series, but it left me rather grumpy all the same.

Recall that at the end of the fourth book, before I took a detour off into short stories, I was thrilled at the plot-full nature of the book. Stuff happening! Cliffhanger! And this book opens with a return to Mendoza’s narration, in which exciting things happen . . . and then almost all the rest of the book is backstory.

It’s good backstory, that of Alec Checkerfield, and it leads up to some affecting and interestingly weird stuff; but still, not much motion on the overall plot. And the next book is a fixup, so I don’t expect much out of that, either. Grump.

Also, I would really like someone in-story to test the assertion that recorded history can’t be changed, because it would affect my opinion of some of the moral calculations. (Don’t tell me if I’m going to get it.) But then, I’m on record as having difficulty with time travel stories anyway.

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My reaction to Kage Baker’s The Graveyard Game, the fourth Company novel, can be summed up thusly:

Woo! Plot! All the way through!

Which is to say, the book opens with Joseph and Lewis (introduced briefly in Sky Coyote) deciding to search for Mendoza after Mendoza in Hollywood, and thus avoids the prior books’ pattern of spending a while enjoying historical ambience before the plot kicks in. They go questing, learn lots of nasty things about the Company, and find the burdens of their past increasing in different ways, as Joseph wrestles with his guilt and Lewis slowly unravels. And then—cliffhanger! Off in at least one unexpected direction!

Yay, plot.

It’s possible that the unexpected direction could end up being somewhat wacky or over the top, or that the future portrayed in the series (this book spans 1996-2276) could get on my nerves. But I’m willing to roll with those possibilities for now because I like the characters and appreciate the momentum that’s being built up. (In that regard, it may be a mistake to go to one of the short story collections next, but I like reading in publication order.)

The other thing of note here is the point of view, which is omniscient wrapped in a first-person framing device. The omni is a bit peculiar in a series that had been so tightly first-person until now, but I can see why the expanded nature of the story demanded it. (Also, randomly, it made me belatedly notice that Sky Coyote lacked an external framing device.)

Kudos to Tor, by the way, for bringing the entire series back into print, even if it does mean that my copies will be a mix of trade and mass market paperbacks.

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I continue to enjoy Kage Baker’s Company series with the third book, Mendoza in Hollywood, which is the first new to me. I think this book is an improvement over the first two in a couple of respects, though it continues the less-than-ideal trend of leaving most of the plot until pretty late in the book.

One of the improvements is that the foregrounded plot, of life in 1860s California (where Hollywood will be, eventually), turns out to be relevant to the overall plot, of the mystery of the Company. I consider this a good thing because when a book has two plots going at once, I tend to get bored with one unless they are obviously related. In addition, the earlier parts of the book (before the plot kicks into gear) are very much concerned with the ways immortals deal with love, family, home, and loss, which I found more interesting than the equivalent sections in the first two books. I also note that the overall weirdness of Mendoza’s life is beginning to complicate in ways that, presumably, will be relevant to the eventual payoff of the series. And I continue to enjoy her narration a lot; the book is almost entirely in the form of her testimony before a Company disciplinary hearing, as the opening indicates:

You want the truth from me? It’s a subjective thing, truth, you know, and you could just as easily get damning evidence you need from the datafeed transcripts. Oh, but you wouldn’t get my motive, would you? I see the point.

Will it help if I freely confess? I killed six—no, seven—mortal men, though I must say it was under provocation. I acted in direct violation of all the laws that govern us, of the principles instilled in me when I was at school. I betrayed those principles by becoming involved in a mortal quarrel, supporting a cause I knew must fail in the end. Worst of all, I stole Company property—myself, when I deserted the post to which I had been assigned. I don’t expect mercy, señors.

But it might help you to know that what I did, I did for love.

I had an unfortunate experience when I was a young operative, you see; I was baptized in the blood of a martyr. No, really. Did you know those things work, baptisms? I didn’t. . . .

I was blindsided, as I’m sure you would have been, by the discovery that the experience had actually left some kind of psychic mark on me. . . . For a long time I thought I had shaken off his spell. I was almost happy there in the mountains all alone. But you wouldn’t let well enough alone. You sent me back into mortal places, and he found me again, tracked me by the mark he’d put on me for that purpose.

He will never let me rest.

I speculate that the book may be the end of an opening trilogy for the series: it comes back to the very opening of the first, and the next book appears not to have a historical setting. I’m really looking forward to additional movement on the overall plot, and it’s only the vague feeling that I ought to write up one book before starting the next that’s kept me from plunging ahead (well, and lack of time, but what else is new?).

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