bibliogramma | The End of The Company (Reply)

I have now read all of Kage Baker’s Tales of The Company. Or at least, those released to date – despite the clear sense of having reached the end of the very complex story she was telling in The Sons of Heaven, ostensibly the last book of the series, I note that she is going to be writing at least one novel featuring key character Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax at some point prior to the events of the last couple of Company novels.

I should note that because this is a series with a massive cast of characters, most of whom are immortal, and many of whom are thousands of years old, who have a lot of history with each other, and because there are six previous novels in the series in which a great deal happens, I’m not going to explain much about the books. If you know the series, the following will probably make sense. If you don’t… it’s just to complicated to explain. Read the first couple of novels if you’re curious. If you keep reading, you’ll know what I mean. If you don’t, it won’t really matter.

Basics – there’s a Company called Zeus Inc. in the future that has the secret of time travel and the secret of immortality, but because travel itself is a lot harder than just communication through time, and immortality only works on children – and not all children at that – the Company set up a station very, very far in the past and selected some children to make into immortals. Since then, the Company has been sending these immortals information on what’s going to happen in their future so that they can save rare art, plants that will be going extinct, and other cool stuff and hide or bury it in places that won’t be found so that in the future, the Company can dig them up and exploit them. And all of these immortals have been living through all of human time, just doing the Company’s bidding. But there’s a mystery. No communications have ever come back in time to any Company operative from after July 8, 2355. And no one, not any of the immortals in the past, and not any of the humans who run the Company in its present, know why. There are other mysteries, too, dealing with plagues, missing immortals, strange humanoids, and other stuff, but all of that is really part of what leads up to the big mystery. So…

Black Projects, White Knights and Gods and Pawns are collections of short stories about many of the characters, both main and secondary, in the long, long tapestry of the Company. Interesting in themselves, that also contain information useful to the full understanding of how the series ends, and ought to be read somewhere in the sequence before the final volume. Seeing as all these characters move around in time, and Baker often tells us things about their later life before she gets around to their earlier life (only the central character Mendoza seems to have a storyline that mostly follows her life in the same order as she experiences it), I’m not going to suggest exactly when is the right time to read these collections, but it should be sometime after, say, the third novel and before the last one.

And then there are the novels, The Machine’s Child and The Sons of Heaven. I’m treating them together, because they really do run right into one another in terms of action.

I both enjoyed and felt a bit let down by the ending Baker gave to her series. There were lots of things I loved. The intense and multi-layered plots, plans, deceptions, betrayals, and other machinations on the part of all the various factions, groups and assorted individuals, leading up to the great mystery of what happens on July 8, 2355, are lots of fun to read and follow in a bit of a feverish daze, wondering who has the right idea and will the folks with the scenario you like best actually be the ones who take control after the mysterious moment.

I also enjoyed Baker’s rather dystopic vision of the future, in which no one knows how to read anymore, and people live very sanitised and secure lives full of fear and massive invasion of privacy. It’s not a world I’d want to live in. Interestingly, there are elements of both right-wing and left-wing perspectives of what horrors the future could hold – Bakers’ future England seems to be an extrapolation not only of “Big Brother” but also of the “nanny state.”

What annoyed me, and in the end disappointed me, was the key plotline centred around the explicitly triune nature of Mendoza’s lover/s and his/their apotheosis. By the time I’d read through all of the intra-psychic warfare and semi-mystical journeys that bring Alec-Edward-Nicholas to the final stage of his/their evolution, I was getting bored with the character/s. After all, this has been, or so I thought, Mendoza’s story, more or less. So how come it’s her boyfriend who ends up running the universe, while she just gets all goofy-eyed about having his babies? Why can't she have babies and run the universe herself?