Mon 24 Mar 2008
These are two more installments in Baker’s “Company” series of books, which I got turned onto by the lovely Kenneth over at homefries.org.
Alan got me these two for Christmas, and I couldn’t figure out exactly what order to read them in. Given the centrality of time travel in this series, maybe it doesn’t matter so much.
The central idea here is that there is this shadowy organization, Dr. Zeus, Inc., usually known as “The Company”, which has developed two fairly radical technologies: time travel and immortality. Of course there are some important limitations. For time travel, one can only travel into one’s own past, never the future, and one can only travel to a given exact moment in time and space once. Also, the general understanding among those in the Company is that history cannot be changed, so they must operate in the shadows of unrecorded history. In terms of immortality, it can only be inflicted upon children, and the resulting person is really more of a cyborg than a regular human. Dr. Zeus uses these cyborgs to basically preserve stuff that was otherwise be lost to history (art, books, cultures, you name it). This isn’t an entirely altruistic enterprise, and the Company becomes fabulously rich and powerful through well-timed investments, the power of compound interest, and occasional interventions.
Much of the series follows Preserver Mendoza, one of the Company cyborgs who is rescued by Facilitator Joseph (one of the oldest Company immortals) during the Inqusition and given the immortality treatment to become another permanent employee of the Company. Mendoza ultimately gets into trouble by falling in love with a mortal who dies tragically, and centuries later falling in love with another mortal who could have been the clone of the first. She ultimately gets banished into the distant past by her Company masters, and she is visited by a third mortal who is yet another clone of the first two, and falls in love all over again.
In “The Life of the World to Come” much of this is explained, and we see into our rather dismal and decrepit future some of the unimpressive mortals who seem to run the Company and whose machinations create the circumstances that control the lives of Mendoza, Joseph, and others. The big question that runs throughout much of this is “What happens in 2355?”, as no one in the Company has any information on the future after this time (since no one has sent any information into the past), and circumstances are set into motion that will obviously have enormous consequences for everyone involved in the Company.
“Sky Coyote” is something of a side-story, and follows Joseph and Mendoza as they work to preserve an entire 18th century Native American Chumash village from the impending arrival of Westerners. This book works mostly as satire, as Joseph is surgically altered to resemble Sky Coyote, the Chumash’ trickster-deity, who warns them of the impending disaster and who offers to lead them to safety. The Chumash turn out to be a savvy bunch, and much of the book involves convincing the Chumash that the sky is indeed falling, and keeping the plan in motion despite both humorous and serious attempts to derail it.