After eight novels and more than a dozen short stories, Kage Baker finally tells the story of what happens on July 9, 2355 in the Heinleinesque The Sons of Heaven. The immortal cyborg employees of Dr. Zeus Inc. have long waited to find out why the Temporal Concordance, the vast database recording all they know about history, has no entries from that day forward.
The mortal directors and scientific staff have their own thoughts on the subject, which are precisely what the staff fear: After tens of thousands of years, all substantial economic value the company can plunder/preserve has been achieved and the cyborgs–who frighten their mortal masters–can be terminated. Due to the scientists’ own towering achievements that is an incredibly difficult task but they think it has finally been done and will distribute it in the form of a special batch of chocolates sent as a thank you for a job well done. The cyborgs, of course, are not that stupid.
Indeed several different factions of them have been working for centuries to turn the tables on that date; some want to become dictators of the few remaining mortals, some want to wipe the planet clean of them, some only care about retribution on the leadership of Dr. Zeus and others just want to be through with taking orders for distasteful jobs. Baker shows us scenes for each group’s preparations.
Then there are the Little People, the faeries of old, who hate the cyborgs for beating them into hiding millenniums ago and haven’t forgotten. They want revenge and use their superior science to infiltrate the Company; the killing serum as well as the distribution plan comes from their best researcher.
Finally, the three Company-created mortals, Alex Checkerfield, Nicholas Harpole and Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, have a key part to play. When we last saw them in The Machine’s Child, all three were occupying Alex’s body and warring for control over it while straining to prevent the cyborg each loved during their normal lifetimes, the botanist Mendoza, from learning just who was inside Alex. Baker gives an entertaining solution to their pseudo-sibling rivalry and the four who, along with sentient AI pirate Captain Henry Morgan, have been central to the entire series turn out to be the most important players in what goes down on the 9th of July.
In a very amusing twist, Kage stops the 2355 action dead in its tracks to cover that sibling rivalry/Mendoza story 500,000 years in the past. At first I was not happy but as it went on I realized this was an important passage from both plot and literary perspectives rather than trilogyitis-like page count padding.
A number of subplots are also resolved. Literary Preservation Specialist Lewis, long a captive of the faerie scientists, returns and gets his long-desired chance to be the hero. Kalugin, lost at sea, is found though this seems more a gift to certain readers as he remains offstage with all references coming from more significant characters. William Randolph Hearst, Joseph and Lewis’s host in Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst (from the Gods and Pawns collection), is still around and an enthusiastic member of Executive Facilitator Joseph and Enforcer Budu’s faction.
Two conclusions came to me as I read the final 100-150 pages: As mentioned in the first ‘graph, Robert Heinlein is a major influence on the entire series, though it’s the post-Stranger in a Strange Land, Lazarus Long era Heinlein and not his early Future History work. Second, Baker has actually written a Singularity tale. A different kind, since that point of no return isn’t reached in the same sort of technological sense we usually imagine (e.g., Stross’s Accelerando, MacLeod’s Fall Revolution sequence).
definitely recommended
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