viriconium (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} viriconium) wrote,@ 2008-07-29 23:02:00 |
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Kage Baker, The Life Of The World To Come
The first chapter of this, the fourth Company novel, is pretty thrilling (don't read past this point if you haven't started the series yet). Mendoza, post-In Hollywood massacre, is in a lonely but not too terrible exile in the distant past, tending vegetables and longing for her twice-dead lover who maybe not-so-coincidentally has mysterious ties to the origins of Dr. Zeus, Inc. And then, awesomely, he shows up in a stolen Company time machine, as idealistic and angsty and bashful as ever! And it's Alec from Black Projects, White Knights! Which is a reveal that makes perfect sense and would have been totally obvious if I'd read Hollywood before Black Projects (thus knowing the form that the alternate Nicholases would take) but manages to be really fun. The whirlwind meeting/reunion/romance is touching, Alec has to leave but promises to return, and Company goons come to imprison Mendoza in Options Research, which I had kind assumed she'd been sent to in the first place. So far, so good.
Then we tread water with 300 pages of backstory until the shocker ending, which is also great! The in-between, less so.
The main thread of the novel follows the mechanically talented Alec Checkerfield from birth to unhappy childhood to troubled adolescence to tormented young adulthood as he searches in vain for a meaningful cause to which to devote himself. His rich parents neglect him, he acquires and decripples an AI which becomes his surrogate parent ("Smart Alec" is reproduced here with minor revision), he drifts about smuggling and failing to connect with people and testing how much his money, title, and privilege allow him to get away with, and, eventually, he investigates his origins and commits an act of incredibly misjudged "idealism" which results in tragedy and a great deal of motivating guilt. When he discovers that Dr. Zeus, through manipulation and psychological programming, is responsible for leading him to commit his crime (to the Company's benefit, of course), he sets off for revenge, leading him to his all-important meeting with Mendoza and to his hapless creators in a really anticlimactic showdown (the anticlimax is deliberate, which doesn't really excuse it).
Oh, yeah, his creators. The other storyline follows a trio of extremely self-involved Company scientists [1], the original design team for the Enforcers, in the wake of the forced retirement of Budu and company. Dubbing themselves the New Inklings due to a deeply felt shared love (and, in most instances, parodic misunderstanding) of Tolkien, Lewis, et al, they set out to develop a more flexible and advanced replacement model, a hero with all the qualities of their favorite characters, one without the proven flaw of immortality. We witness the results with them as they create and follow the careers of Nicholas, Edward, and Alec from a different, more detached perspective (they don't have the whole story themselves, and they're surprised to learn of the part their creation plays in the origins of Dr. Zeus, and baffled as to why Mendoza keeps showing up -- the ones pulling the strings have yet to reveal themselves). This is cute and silly for awhile, with clever explanations for things like the recurring broken nose, but it goes on and on with the geeky overgrown kid back-and-forth and the "funny" Swearing Of Tomorrow until it's long past entertaining [2]. While the future history continues to be thematically relevant, as it's primarily concerned with the many ways economic development and capitalism shape the lives of human beings, the future culture reaches new levels of that suffocating cartoonish wackiness that only lets up when the reader is asked to take these grotesques seriously as moral agents. To my mind, this isn't a good direction for Baker to be going in [3].
Baker's science is worse here than ever; before, the characters were believably intelligent (with acceptable blind spots), the botany was credible, qualms with the time travel were handwaved away with hints they would be addressed in the future, and period England was so elaborately and lovingly evoked that a physics mistake or two was ignorable. This time, none of those virtues are present, so there isn't much to distract when Baker makes it painfully clear she has no idea what a tetraploid genome is. Then there's the nonsensical Big Horrible Thing that happens on Mars. Speaking of that: Alec is shocked -- shocked! -- when his gunrunning results in unexpected loss of life. It's a moment of such stunning naivete from a character who is supposed to be smart that the author's heavy hand is unignorable and even the resulting guilt rings false.
But the faults here, as with The Graveyard Game, aren't unforgivable. They're mainly a function of stretching too little new material over too many pages, of taking so long to set everything up that the series is over halfway over and we're still mired in inelegant chess-piece-pushing mode. The first few Company books promised more than the pleasures of genre fiction, and at this point even the cool parts are becoming rarer and rarer. Still, there's still more than enough time to turn things around. The novel's ending promises a quick and unpredictable acceleration of events. Alec's mental state is fucked up and fragmented in such a way as seems likely to yield wonderful results. He's an unhinged rebel on Mendoza's trail with a grudge against the Company. So is Joseph. They're likely to meet and they'll be forced to team up and sparks will awesomely fly. Plus, Alec's rescue of the Captain from the clutches of Dr. Zeus was all too easy -- Trojan horse from that Company AI? -- and the poor long-suffering mentor's days are almost certainly numbered anyway. The war between immortals -- Suleyman and Latif versus the plague club -- is overdue to be boiling over, and I don't even know what Mendoza is going to do when she's freed, but I expect it to be neat. Okay. *Now* everything's in place, and Mendoza's super-maize has been stressed to the point that if it doesn't wind up being key to everything, I'll be disappointed.
[1] Chatterji is from "Monster Story," so the unremarked-upon irony is that he creates Alec, the one responsible for getting him involved in the Company in the first place, but I'm not sure if we're meant to see that story as continuity; the novel is not always consistent with the Black Projects stories, and you'd think he might have remembered the strange kid who gave him those answers. But there'd be no point giving him the name if he weren't supposed to be the same person and we weren't meant to make the connection.
[2] Yeah, it's like the nerd trio from Buffy Season 6, with bad jokes about literature and Joseph Campbell instead of cliched TV geek jokes.
[3] I present Connie Willis as a cautionary example. Now she does *nothing else.*
The first chapter of this, the fourth Company novel, is pretty thrilling (don't read past this point if you haven't started the series yet). Mendoza, post-In Hollywood massacre, is in a lonely but not too terrible exile in the distant past, tending vegetables and longing for her twice-dead lover who maybe not-so-coincidentally has mysterious ties to the origins of Dr. Zeus, Inc. And then, awesomely, he shows up in a stolen Company time machine, as idealistic and angsty and bashful as ever! And it's Alec from Black Projects, White Knights! Which is a reveal that makes perfect sense and would have been totally obvious if I'd read Hollywood before Black Projects (thus knowing the form that the alternate Nicholases would take) but manages to be really fun. The whirlwind meeting/reunion/romance is touching, Alec has to leave but promises to return, and Company goons come to imprison Mendoza in Options Research, which I had kind assumed she'd been sent to in the first place. So far, so good.
Then we tread water with 300 pages of backstory until the shocker ending, which is also great! The in-between, less so.
The main thread of the novel follows the mechanically talented Alec Checkerfield from birth to unhappy childhood to troubled adolescence to tormented young adulthood as he searches in vain for a meaningful cause to which to devote himself. His rich parents neglect him, he acquires and decripples an AI which becomes his surrogate parent ("Smart Alec" is reproduced here with minor revision), he drifts about smuggling and failing to connect with people and testing how much his money, title, and privilege allow him to get away with, and, eventually, he investigates his origins and commits an act of incredibly misjudged "idealism" which results in tragedy and a great deal of motivating guilt. When he discovers that Dr. Zeus, through manipulation and psychological programming, is responsible for leading him to commit his crime (to the Company's benefit, of course), he sets off for revenge, leading him to his all-important meeting with Mendoza and to his hapless creators in a really anticlimactic showdown (the anticlimax is deliberate, which doesn't really excuse it).
Oh, yeah, his creators. The other storyline follows a trio of extremely self-involved Company scientists [1], the original design team for the Enforcers, in the wake of the forced retirement of Budu and company. Dubbing themselves the New Inklings due to a deeply felt shared love (and, in most instances, parodic misunderstanding) of Tolkien, Lewis, et al, they set out to develop a more flexible and advanced replacement model, a hero with all the qualities of their favorite characters, one without the proven flaw of immortality. We witness the results with them as they create and follow the careers of Nicholas, Edward, and Alec from a different, more detached perspective (they don't have the whole story themselves, and they're surprised to learn of the part their creation plays in the origins of Dr. Zeus, and baffled as to why Mendoza keeps showing up -- the ones pulling the strings have yet to reveal themselves). This is cute and silly for awhile, with clever explanations for things like the recurring broken nose, but it goes on and on with the geeky overgrown kid back-and-forth and the "funny" Swearing Of Tomorrow until it's long past entertaining [2]. While the future history continues to be thematically relevant, as it's primarily concerned with the many ways economic development and capitalism shape the lives of human beings, the future culture reaches new levels of that suffocating cartoonish wackiness that only lets up when the reader is asked to take these grotesques seriously as moral agents. To my mind, this isn't a good direction for Baker to be going in [3].
Baker's science is worse here than ever; before, the characters were believably intelligent (with acceptable blind spots), the botany was credible, qualms with the time travel were handwaved away with hints they would be addressed in the future, and period England was so elaborately and lovingly evoked that a physics mistake or two was ignorable. This time, none of those virtues are present, so there isn't much to distract when Baker makes it painfully clear she has no idea what a tetraploid genome is. Then there's the nonsensical Big Horrible Thing that happens on Mars. Speaking of that: Alec is shocked -- shocked! -- when his gunrunning results in unexpected loss of life. It's a moment of such stunning naivete from a character who is supposed to be smart that the author's heavy hand is unignorable and even the resulting guilt rings false.
But the faults here, as with The Graveyard Game, aren't unforgivable. They're mainly a function of stretching too little new material over too many pages, of taking so long to set everything up that the series is over halfway over and we're still mired in inelegant chess-piece-pushing mode. The first few Company books promised more than the pleasures of genre fiction, and at this point even the cool parts are becoming rarer and rarer. Still, there's still more than enough time to turn things around. The novel's ending promises a quick and unpredictable acceleration of events. Alec's mental state is fucked up and fragmented in such a way as seems likely to yield wonderful results. He's an unhinged rebel on Mendoza's trail with a grudge against the Company. So is Joseph. They're likely to meet and they'll be forced to team up and sparks will awesomely fly. Plus, Alec's rescue of the Captain from the clutches of Dr. Zeus was all too easy -- Trojan horse from that Company AI? -- and the poor long-suffering mentor's days are almost certainly numbered anyway. The war between immortals -- Suleyman and Latif versus the plague club -- is overdue to be boiling over, and I don't even know what Mendoza is going to do when she's freed, but I expect it to be neat. Okay. *Now* everything's in place, and Mendoza's super-maize has been stressed to the point that if it doesn't wind up being key to everything, I'll be disappointed.
[1] Chatterji is from "Monster Story," so the unremarked-upon irony is that he creates Alec, the one responsible for getting him involved in the Company in the first place, but I'm not sure if we're meant to see that story as continuity; the novel is not always consistent with the Black Projects stories, and you'd think he might have remembered the strange kid who gave him those answers. But there'd be no point giving him the name if he weren't supposed to be the same person and we weren't meant to make the connection.
[2] Yeah, it's like the nerd trio from Buffy Season 6, with bad jokes about literature and Joseph Campbell instead of cliched TV geek jokes.
[3] I present Connie Willis as a cautionary example. Now she does *nothing else.*
