The sixth, latest installment of Kage Baker’s excellent series about the immortal cyborg servants of Dr. Zeus Inc., The Children of the Company moves the unifying story along sharply while bringing some of the big players out of the shadows and onto the main stage. Unfortunately, sort of, I once again let my eagerness to read a book put me out of the proper sequence since I have yet to read The Life of the World to Come, book number five. Oh well.
Really it isn’t as much of a problem with this series than it might be with others because the attraction is the way Baker inserts her people into the shadows of real history and because most of the books are short stories melded together. There is a bigger arc but, unlike the Haldeman book discussed in the previous entry, the components make sense rather than being an occasion for writerly muscle stretching.
Mortals never really learn the true nature of the cyborgs who, having the benefit of history books, can pinch doomed treasures before fire or flood destroys them and preserve plants and animals before true extinction. All to be sold or used at company headquarters up in the 24th century. Immortality alone, as Baker makes clear in every volume, doesn’t protect its possessors from emotional pains and the human condition and there are enough willing servants to keep dissidents and the disaffected in line.
Children focuses on Executive Facilitator General Labenius. Born in prehistoric times–with nothing recorded, operatives are free to do nearly anything in Dr. Zeus’s interest without violating the allegedly unchangable nature of history–Labenius loathes normal humans and, whenever he can without jeapordizing his leadership position, dispatches death and misery. Meanwhile he decides that in the mysterious future year when the history books end, the strictures imposed by his employers can come off. The book is structured as a series of reviews and remembrances of operations he lead or instigated.
recommended
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