Entry tags:

books, fiction

Kage Baker, Black Projects, White Knights

An accomplished and wide-ranging collection of Company-related short stories that expand Baker's universe in surprising and clever ways. Baker is a natural storyteller, and her astonishing command of structure and tone -- from the very beginning of her career, even -- is anchored by her strong, wise, bemused narrative voice in the service of some very well-crafted and effective material. Even more than the first two novels, these stories interrogate more than the Company's goals and methods; they question the impulse behind the pursuit of profit and progress.

While most of the stories deal with the Company's immortal operatives (Mendoza and Joseph are present, as are others), the real star of the book is Alec Checkerfield, a very special boy (and possibly a Company experiment) from the overly sanitized 24th Century. The son of an Earl, abandoned by his parents to be raised by the (thankfully kind) hired help, Alec develops complexes and an obsession with pirates, the subject of his favorite films. When he's given a Pembroke Playfriend, a sort of crippled AI used to socialize children [1], his specialness interacts with the system in ways never dreamed of by the manufacturers, and he removes the Ethical Governor that prevents it from fulfilling its prime directive: Serving its master By Any Means Necessary. Thankfully, Baker avoids the perils of giving her hero a super-intelligent AI sidekick with the ability to do just about anything (since Alec's impulse to do good may end up screwing over the people around him); these stories follow Alec's developing moral sense as he balances his compassion with his pirate aspirations (he refuses to take the Superman III / Office Space route, for example). I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when Alec investigates the immortals and his origins (Alec's code of ethics in pursuit of plunder sounds suspiciously similar to the values that the Company purports to hold), and is his weakness for the ladies going to be his tragic flaw or his anchor to humanity? Plus, how could you dislike a kid who "had made a picture of a shark fighting with an anchor, because he knew how to draw anchors and he knew how to draw sharks, and that was all the logic the scene needed."

Every story here mines some cool aspect of Baker's worldbuilding that's deserving of attention. "Facts Relating to the Arrest of Dr. Kalugin" finds the cover of a hapless operative beset by one of the early failed test subjects of the immortality process we've heard whispers about, and in "Hanuman" Mendoza receives some stealth grief counseling from another special individual who's caught between two worlds. "Old Flat Top" gives us more information about the Preserver/Enforcer division, and finds a role for the Enforcers, who might not be entirely obsolete after all. "Lemuria *Will* Rise!" implies weirdness to come, with a seeming crackpot who knows way more than he should, and the chilling final story establishes just how dismembered and fucked up these immortals can get and still pull themselves together. "The Literary Agent" is the closest to a dud in this collection (LOL meddling executives interfering with the creative mind and wanting crowd-pleasing crap), but the flaws in the rest of the stories are minor; they're diverse while being consistently good, and they all feel *relevant,* even the intro, where there's a cryptic moment indicating we may not be done with poor martyred Nicholas Harpole just yet. I'm hooked.

[1] And it's nice that, even while functioning normally, the Playfriend is rather insightful and empathetic -- it's not just satirical of new agey childrearing attitudes. Alec's future is a dystopia with the potential for lame satire (oh noes, animal rights and paranoia about children's safety), but at least the stress is on the ways class privilege perpetuates itself behind a facade of equal opportunity.