(no subject)
Jan. 3rd, 2022 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSky Coyote, the second book in the Company series, is not anywhere near as good a book as In the Garden of Iden on its own, and for this reason I blithely thought I would be completely immune to caring very much about it.
Unfortunately! it turns out! that isn't how this works!
The narrator of Sky Coyote is Joseph -- Mendoza's bad dad, a slimy little fast-talking used car salesman of an immortal who's been doing varyingly sketchy deals on Company orders since the prehistoric era. In this book, the year is 1700 and his job is to play the role of Sky Coyote and convince a tribe of California Chumash to get on an airship and let the Company whisk them away to a secure base so that their culture, geneprint, etc. can be studied and preserved for wealthy hippy clients in the future who have convinced themselves that they were Chumash in their past lives.
Obviously this premise is. Hmm. Well. You know. Like, the book is in large part a satire on capitalism and appropriation, as exemplified by the Company and the wealthy future clients who are paying big money for Traditional Chumash Folkways. The Chumash themselves (who most likely originated the use of currency for economic trade in the Americas) come in for more than their share of affectionate satire, but most of the jokes revolve around the idea that businessmen and labor exploitation are the same everywhere ... what I'm saying is, you look at the premise, and you look at the book, and you grimace to yourself, and you think 'well, that could have been much worse?' But the premise is still what it is, which is 'protagonist poses as major indigenous religious figure, for Successful Schemes,' and there simply is no getting around that.
('Worse,' actually, is the judgmental servant Mayans in the beginning who are serving the immortals in their big fancy immortal base camp -- the jokes are very, hmm, Terry Pratchett thinking he's being funny about slaves who think they're better than you, and it's just not a good joke! But fortunately it doesn't last very long.)
Anyway. That's the A plot of the book, technically, but the actual emotional stakes of the book are all in the quietly understated B plot, which is: Joseph works with his Mendoza again for the first time since Things Went South in Garden of Iden, and does his best for her, which is not very good! this, unfortunately, devastates me!
"I was hoping you'd forgive me eventually," I said.
She brought her gaze back to me with a snap. "I didn't say I'd forgiven you," she said. [...] "No lies, no denials? Well, good for you. Listen, don’t feel too badly about this. I can’t forgive you, but I do understand you had no choice. You’re a Company man, and you had to do what the Company wanted. You always have; you always will. I don’t hate you for it.” She reached out and patted my paw absently. “There’s not enough of you inside there to hate, is there?”
When this conversation happens, we've been in Joseph's head for almost a whole book; we know exactly how much of him there is in there, shoved under thousands of years of guilt and fear and bad jokes and self-justification, after the first time he found himself standing awkwardly in the middle between the Company and the righteous contempt of somebody he loved. And this particular book doesn't even really move him along in a character arc! Pretty much all it does is force him to acknowledge that there's a character arc along which he has deliberately not been moving! But I'm deeply attached to this horrible little remnant of personhood scraped over a thousand-year-old void who is coming to the glacially slow realization that there are parts of him he might not be willing to sacrifice, and seeing the shape of that arc illuminated is still enough to give me big feelings, it turns out.
Unfortunately! it turns out! that isn't how this works!
The narrator of Sky Coyote is Joseph -- Mendoza's bad dad, a slimy little fast-talking used car salesman of an immortal who's been doing varyingly sketchy deals on Company orders since the prehistoric era. In this book, the year is 1700 and his job is to play the role of Sky Coyote and convince a tribe of California Chumash to get on an airship and let the Company whisk them away to a secure base so that their culture, geneprint, etc. can be studied and preserved for wealthy hippy clients in the future who have convinced themselves that they were Chumash in their past lives.
Obviously this premise is. Hmm. Well. You know. Like, the book is in large part a satire on capitalism and appropriation, as exemplified by the Company and the wealthy future clients who are paying big money for Traditional Chumash Folkways. The Chumash themselves (who most likely originated the use of currency for economic trade in the Americas) come in for more than their share of affectionate satire, but most of the jokes revolve around the idea that businessmen and labor exploitation are the same everywhere ... what I'm saying is, you look at the premise, and you look at the book, and you grimace to yourself, and you think 'well, that could have been much worse?' But the premise is still what it is, which is 'protagonist poses as major indigenous religious figure, for Successful Schemes,' and there simply is no getting around that.
('Worse,' actually, is the judgmental servant Mayans in the beginning who are serving the immortals in their big fancy immortal base camp -- the jokes are very, hmm, Terry Pratchett thinking he's being funny about slaves who think they're better than you, and it's just not a good joke! But fortunately it doesn't last very long.)
Anyway. That's the A plot of the book, technically, but the actual emotional stakes of the book are all in the quietly understated B plot, which is: Joseph works with his Mendoza again for the first time since Things Went South in Garden of Iden, and does his best for her, which is not very good! this, unfortunately, devastates me!
"I was hoping you'd forgive me eventually," I said.
She brought her gaze back to me with a snap. "I didn't say I'd forgiven you," she said. [...] "No lies, no denials? Well, good for you. Listen, don’t feel too badly about this. I can’t forgive you, but I do understand you had no choice. You’re a Company man, and you had to do what the Company wanted. You always have; you always will. I don’t hate you for it.” She reached out and patted my paw absently. “There’s not enough of you inside there to hate, is there?”
When this conversation happens, we've been in Joseph's head for almost a whole book; we know exactly how much of him there is in there, shoved under thousands of years of guilt and fear and bad jokes and self-justification, after the first time he found himself standing awkwardly in the middle between the Company and the righteous contempt of somebody he loved. And this particular book doesn't even really move him along in a character arc! Pretty much all it does is force him to acknowledge that there's a character arc along which he has deliberately not been moving! But I'm deeply attached to this horrible little remnant of personhood scraped over a thousand-year-old void who is coming to the glacially slow realization that there are parts of him he might not be willing to sacrifice, and seeing the shape of that arc illuminated is still enough to give me big feelings, it turns out.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-04 04:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-04 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-13 05:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-04 05:28 am (UTC)That emotional inflection point is pretty much the only thing I remember about Sky Coyote, so I believe your big feelings are justified.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 07:01 am (UTC)Have you already diagrammed here what that would look like?
no subject
Date: 2022-01-04 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-04 10:36 pm (UTC)That burn is so ICE-COLD that I can feel the frost from here. The combination with the hand-patting, in particular, is just *chef's kiss*
no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 04:10 am (UTC)