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Jul. 1st, 2023 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAmong the other activities that kept me busy in late May/early June, I was also engaged in zooming through a massive reread of the last four of Kage Baker's Company books so that I could complete them in time to make an angry powerpoint for my friend's Zoom birthday party.
I maintain that this was a great and important use of my time! Unfortunately this has also had the predictable consequence that now all I want to do is grab people by the collar and rant about the Company books. I have now done this so much that I have already ended up giving the full powerpoint a second time on a completely unrelated Zoom call, and now I am going to once again deliver my rant to all of you!
All right. So, at the last point in my previously leisurely Company reread, Mendoza had been arrested by the Company from the narrative, her best friend Lewis had been kidnapped by weird little fairies under the hill for horrible experiments, and her estranged dad Joseph had rescued his estranged Neanderthal dad Budu and decided to fully buy in on his plan to come down from the hills and slaughter all evildoers with righteous fury.
There is one more Company book after this that I think is moderately worth reading. That's Book Six, and we'll get there. First is Book Five.
The Life of the World to Come
This book introduces ANOTHER Nicholas clone, Alec Checkerfield. Alec Checkerfield lives in Kage Baker's vision of the future, which is full of annoying vegetarian Puriteens who have banned everything fun and mostly don't know how to read; as a result, Alec is a piracy-obsessed programming genius with the vocabulary and emotional range of a twelve-year-old, who, in a desperate quest to introduce meaning in his life, gets involved with weapons smuggling and accidentally blows up the moon. Alec Checkerfield is not MY ENEMY the way Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax is my enemy but three hundred pages of this is quite a lot.
What I do hate, passionately, is the discovery that Nicholas-Edward-Alec were the result of a Company Experiment in Creating Superman. It is so thematically important to In the Garden of Iden that Nicholas is just a human guy! Mendoza spends pages and pages grappling with how this philosophically shakes her worldview about cyborg superiority!! Kage, why did you do this to me. WHY did you do this to me. In the Garden of Iden should have been a standalone.
Anyway, somewhere in the middle of all this, Alec gets in a time travel accident and crash-lands in Mendoza's prison in the year 30,000 BC; they have a chapter's worth of mindblowing sex and then Alec goes off to blow up the moon, and also discovers his Company Experiment origins, and accidentally downloads the black-boxed memories of Nicholas and Edward into his own brain and develops a resulting multiple-personality disorder, MY ENEMY RETURNS. More on this anon, but for now a brief pause.
The Children of the Company
This is more or less a book of short stories setting up the various secret cabals among the cyborgs, notable mostly for giving us a good look at Victor, the most tragic cyborg in the world. Victor is a polite little waxed-moustache gentleman who has accidentally tripped and fallen into being mentored by two equally evil bosses, both of whom want to use him to spy on the other one; he also learns towards the end of this book that he has been bioengineered without his knowledge to occasionally secrete DEADLY PLAGUES from his SWEAT! Both bosses blame the other boss for this, but are also like ... hey .... we didn't think you'd mind ..... remember when you were a teenaged intern and we asked you to do some mildly evil shit for us, and you did! well! so you've only got yourself to blame really!!
Victor is also tragically in love with another married cyborg whose husband has mysteriously disappeared, so after he finds out about the plague thing he throws all his energy into selflessly attempting to find the husband while plotting revenge on his evil bosses. All of this is worth mentioning because Victor is the only person in the series who actually manages to achieve his goals and have a satisfying narrative arc without being completely derailed by Nicholas-Alec-Edward!
BUT MORE ON THIS ANON because now we're back to the seventh book, which is where things really start to go sideways.
The Machine's Child
So Alec is now a tormented triple personality in possession of a time machine. He immediately goes off to rescue Mendoza, but, due to a calculation error, ends up getting there after she's been imprisoned and tortured for thousands of years. Now she's completely amnesiac!
NICHOLAS-EDWARD-ALEC: uhhhhh hi. Uhhhhh we are ... married! And have been for years! We are also definitely both cyborgs!
MENDOZA: oh, great! love to hear it! hey out of curiosity why do you sometimes speak like a Tudor and sometimes like a Victorian and sometimes like a sufer --
NICHOLAS-EDWARD-ALEC: do NOT worry about it
Most of The Machine's Child is just amnesiac Mendoza and her tripartite boyfriend jaunting around history, having sex in various time periods while planting various timebombs meant to enable Ultimate Revenge on the Company. Amnesiac Mendoza is NOT a lot of fun for me because she does NOT ask questions and just happily goes along with whatever her fake husband suggests, but sure, fine. They meet Shakespeare. It's fine. At one point Joseph shows up and has a big fight with Nicholas-Alec-Edward in an attempt to rescue Mendoza, but Mendoza doesn't REMEMBER him so this confrontation in which the second major emotional arc in the series comes to a head has NO emotional valence -- whatever! IT'S FINE.
Until! MY ENEMY Edward has a brilliant idea! what if ... instead of having to share one body with two other personalities ... they made two new clone bodies for the other two parts of Mendoza's tripartite boyfriend! And Edward got to keep this one!
Obviously they'd need to start the clones from scratch. Which would mean growing them in a womb. And they just so happen to have one!
EDWARD: hey Mendoza darling what if we had some kids. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Two baby boys ... exactly like me ......
MENDOZA: huh. Well, I can't say kids are super exciting to me off their own bat, but sure, babe, if it'll make you happy!
NICHOLAS, ALEC, THE READER: what? what?? wtf?!?! what?????
EDWARD: oh, Nicholas, Alec, do not worry about it. You guys both have enormous mommy issues, right? Wouldn't it be so great if the one woman you've ever loved could ALSO be your mom in the most literal sense? Wouldn't that fix everything for you, psychologically??
NICHOLAS, ALEC, THE READER: HOLY SHIT PLEASE STOP THIS IMMEDIATELY?!?!
alas! he does not stop. Instead he sets everything in motion and then gets chomped by a crocodile.
The Life of the World to Come
The chomping by a crocodile is important a.) because it allows for Edward to become some kind of super-augmented cyborg and b.) because the trauma of seeing him nearly die again gives Mendoza her memories back! Just in time for Edward to explain that he's trapped the Nicholas (her first love! the only one of these guys she actually knew long enough to care about!) and Alec (whatever) bits of his personality in some kind of cybernetic brain prison and the only way he'll release them is if she agrees to the babies plan.
MENDOZA: ... also, if my memories of the past year are right, you're planning to conquer the world or something?
EDWARD: oh, yeah. For sure for sure.
MENDOZA: ..... okay, fine. To save Nicholas (my eternal love) and Alec (sure) I will agree to the babies plan, if you agree to hold off on world domination for the full eighteen years it'll take to get them to maturity.
EDWARD: yeah all right, that's fine, I've transcended time with my enormous augmented brain power so it doesn't really matter anyway --
MENDOZA: you've what
EDWARD: Transcended time! oh baby I forgot your poor little normal cyborg brain hasn't learned how to transcend time yet, awww, that is so cute
MENDOZA: oh my god
EDWARD: but you still love me, right?
MENDOZA: ... on the one hand, what you have done is absolutely unforgivable. On the other hand, I still think you are very hot and your childhood was very sad. So ... my darling, yes!
So Mendoza is implanted with two clone babies of her one true love, and Edward decants the personalities of Nicholas and Alec into the fetal clones. They learn that this has been successful when Nicholas and Alec start telepathically shrieking 'BAD MAN!' 'SINFUL MAN!' from inside Mendoza's womb.
... and then the whole family -- Edward, Mendoza, and their two clone children implanted respectively with the personalities of Mendoza's One True Love and the guy she had an intense two-day fling with -- retires to a small private island, where Mendoza steals scraps of time around being a full-time mom to work on botany, and Edward gets really, really into Victorian parenting.
And ... somehow .... this fixes him? THIS FIXES HIM. He forgets about world domination! All he cares about is taking care of his kids, and writing his eighteen-volume parenting manual on cyborg child development.
The kids, obviously, have somewhat conflicted feelings about all this.
But it's fine! once they're eighteen everything comes to a head, and Nicholas goes and makes out with Mendoza, and Alec gets in a big fight with Edward, and this solves all their emotional issues and Mendoza has a tripartite husband again, two parts of which are her children and all of which have transcended time and space with their minds. Kind of like ... Mary and the holy Trinity? Get it? GET IT?
Anyway, after all this, suddenly they remember that the series has another plot, the internecine war between the Company and its cyborgs that every other character has been desperately struggling to resolve, and send Nicholas and Alec down to sort it out.
And like, I want to be clear: things have been happening about this. A quick summary of the other things that have been happening, while Mendoza and Edward have been Enjoying Victorian Parenting:
- Lewis, still in captivity, has developed a touching parental relationship with the abused daughter of his captors, who helps him warn all the cyborgs about a plot by the Company to murder them all with poison chocolate
- Joseph and his Neanderthal dad have enlistened the aid of Immortal Cyborg William Randolph Hearst -- the only guy in all of history to be made a cyborg as an adult -- to get together a Neanderthal army to destroy the Company and rule the world (Immortal Cyborg William Randolph Hearst helps by providing them with a lot of plus-size clothing for the Neanderthals to wear)
- every black character in the series is hanging out in one place in Africa, also getting together an army to destroy the Company and rule the world, but much less violently than the Neanderthals
- Victor's two evil bosses and their various evil cabals are putting together rival plans to a.) kill all humans or b.) save just enough humans to be useful household servants ... but first! they want Victor to put together an elaborate dinner party!
Victor does in fact put together this elaborate dinner party, and then uses his plague sweat to destroy BOTH evil cabals at once along with himself, while a string quartet blasts Mozart's requiem and the woman he secretly loves and whose long-lost husband he has just rescued from peril reads his final note politely informing her that he has always held her in highest esteem. Kudos to Victor, who fully nails the landing of his narrative arc with perfect aesthetics a crucial six hours before Mendoza and her tripartite husbands remember about the existence of the A-plot.
Unfortunately for everybody else, their narrative arcs -- as the various factions are just on the verge of a decisive clash to determine the vision of the future world -- are all interrupted by the descent of Mendoza, Alec, Edward and Nicholas from cyborg island heaven, who tell them that they're all being very naughty, all the cyborgs should stop fighting, and the Holy Trinity is in charge of all cyborgs now. Everyone gives up on their deep philosophical disagreements about justice and free will and kind of shrugs and accepts this.
Then Alec, Edward and Nicholas go around laying-on hands to all the injured cyborgs and healing them, except for the really evil ones, AND VICTOR. They keep trying to revive Victor and, sensibly, he simply refuses. His narrative arc is done! Stop messing with it!
THE END.
You may ask, do Joseph and Mendoza ever get to resolve anything? Well, Mendoza tosses Joseph a bunch of photographs of her clone baby boyfriends and tells him to appreciate these pictures of his grandchildren, and as a person who really truly deeply cared about the Mendoza-Joseph thread, this is one of the worst little twists of the knife for me personally --
-- OH AND ANOTHER THING, I had also remembered that after Lewis escapes he at LEAST gets invited into a brief fivesome with Mendoza-Alec-Edward-Nicholas whom he's been ardently writing his million-word fanfic about for so many years. This it turns out was a false memory. :(( NO orgies for Lewis, though he does get a nod as the Only Cyborg Who's Managed To Create Art even if the art he creates are absolute shit.
Also, his new daughter, Princess Tiana Parakeet, ends up hooking up with immortal cyborg William Randolph Hearst. ANOTHER TWIST OF THE KNIFE!!!
-- okay. Okay. I could go on but I have got to stop. This has been: the Company books! Thank you for going with me on this journey; I wish I could say that it's exorcised them from my brain, but, unfortunately, I am now all the way back on my bullshit and Despite Everything may be asking for Company fic for Yuletide.
I maintain that this was a great and important use of my time! Unfortunately this has also had the predictable consequence that now all I want to do is grab people by the collar and rant about the Company books. I have now done this so much that I have already ended up giving the full powerpoint a second time on a completely unrelated Zoom call, and now I am going to once again deliver my rant to all of you!
All right. So, at the last point in my previously leisurely Company reread, Mendoza had been arrested by the Company from the narrative, her best friend Lewis had been kidnapped by weird little fairies under the hill for horrible experiments, and her estranged dad Joseph had rescued his estranged Neanderthal dad Budu and decided to fully buy in on his plan to come down from the hills and slaughter all evildoers with righteous fury.
There is one more Company book after this that I think is moderately worth reading. That's Book Six, and we'll get there. First is Book Five.
The Life of the World to Come
This book introduces ANOTHER Nicholas clone, Alec Checkerfield. Alec Checkerfield lives in Kage Baker's vision of the future, which is full of annoying vegetarian Puriteens who have banned everything fun and mostly don't know how to read; as a result, Alec is a piracy-obsessed programming genius with the vocabulary and emotional range of a twelve-year-old, who, in a desperate quest to introduce meaning in his life, gets involved with weapons smuggling and accidentally blows up the moon. Alec Checkerfield is not MY ENEMY the way Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax is my enemy but three hundred pages of this is quite a lot.
What I do hate, passionately, is the discovery that Nicholas-Edward-Alec were the result of a Company Experiment in Creating Superman. It is so thematically important to In the Garden of Iden that Nicholas is just a human guy! Mendoza spends pages and pages grappling with how this philosophically shakes her worldview about cyborg superiority!! Kage, why did you do this to me. WHY did you do this to me. In the Garden of Iden should have been a standalone.
Anyway, somewhere in the middle of all this, Alec gets in a time travel accident and crash-lands in Mendoza's prison in the year 30,000 BC; they have a chapter's worth of mindblowing sex and then Alec goes off to blow up the moon, and also discovers his Company Experiment origins, and accidentally downloads the black-boxed memories of Nicholas and Edward into his own brain and develops a resulting multiple-personality disorder, MY ENEMY RETURNS. More on this anon, but for now a brief pause.
The Children of the Company
This is more or less a book of short stories setting up the various secret cabals among the cyborgs, notable mostly for giving us a good look at Victor, the most tragic cyborg in the world. Victor is a polite little waxed-moustache gentleman who has accidentally tripped and fallen into being mentored by two equally evil bosses, both of whom want to use him to spy on the other one; he also learns towards the end of this book that he has been bioengineered without his knowledge to occasionally secrete DEADLY PLAGUES from his SWEAT! Both bosses blame the other boss for this, but are also like ... hey .... we didn't think you'd mind ..... remember when you were a teenaged intern and we asked you to do some mildly evil shit for us, and you did! well! so you've only got yourself to blame really!!
Victor is also tragically in love with another married cyborg whose husband has mysteriously disappeared, so after he finds out about the plague thing he throws all his energy into selflessly attempting to find the husband while plotting revenge on his evil bosses. All of this is worth mentioning because Victor is the only person in the series who actually manages to achieve his goals and have a satisfying narrative arc without being completely derailed by Nicholas-Alec-Edward!
BUT MORE ON THIS ANON because now we're back to the seventh book, which is where things really start to go sideways.
The Machine's Child
So Alec is now a tormented triple personality in possession of a time machine. He immediately goes off to rescue Mendoza, but, due to a calculation error, ends up getting there after she's been imprisoned and tortured for thousands of years. Now she's completely amnesiac!
NICHOLAS-EDWARD-ALEC: uhhhhh hi. Uhhhhh we are ... married! And have been for years! We are also definitely both cyborgs!
MENDOZA: oh, great! love to hear it! hey out of curiosity why do you sometimes speak like a Tudor and sometimes like a Victorian and sometimes like a sufer --
NICHOLAS-EDWARD-ALEC: do NOT worry about it
Most of The Machine's Child is just amnesiac Mendoza and her tripartite boyfriend jaunting around history, having sex in various time periods while planting various timebombs meant to enable Ultimate Revenge on the Company. Amnesiac Mendoza is NOT a lot of fun for me because she does NOT ask questions and just happily goes along with whatever her fake husband suggests, but sure, fine. They meet Shakespeare. It's fine. At one point Joseph shows up and has a big fight with Nicholas-Alec-Edward in an attempt to rescue Mendoza, but Mendoza doesn't REMEMBER him so this confrontation in which the second major emotional arc in the series comes to a head has NO emotional valence -- whatever! IT'S FINE.
Until! MY ENEMY Edward has a brilliant idea! what if ... instead of having to share one body with two other personalities ... they made two new clone bodies for the other two parts of Mendoza's tripartite boyfriend! And Edward got to keep this one!
Obviously they'd need to start the clones from scratch. Which would mean growing them in a womb. And they just so happen to have one!
EDWARD: hey Mendoza darling what if we had some kids. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Two baby boys ... exactly like me ......
MENDOZA: huh. Well, I can't say kids are super exciting to me off their own bat, but sure, babe, if it'll make you happy!
NICHOLAS, ALEC, THE READER: what? what?? wtf?!?! what?????
EDWARD: oh, Nicholas, Alec, do not worry about it. You guys both have enormous mommy issues, right? Wouldn't it be so great if the one woman you've ever loved could ALSO be your mom in the most literal sense? Wouldn't that fix everything for you, psychologically??
NICHOLAS, ALEC, THE READER: HOLY SHIT PLEASE STOP THIS IMMEDIATELY?!?!
alas! he does not stop. Instead he sets everything in motion and then gets chomped by a crocodile.
The Life of the World to Come
The chomping by a crocodile is important a.) because it allows for Edward to become some kind of super-augmented cyborg and b.) because the trauma of seeing him nearly die again gives Mendoza her memories back! Just in time for Edward to explain that he's trapped the Nicholas (her first love! the only one of these guys she actually knew long enough to care about!) and Alec (whatever) bits of his personality in some kind of cybernetic brain prison and the only way he'll release them is if she agrees to the babies plan.
MENDOZA: ... also, if my memories of the past year are right, you're planning to conquer the world or something?
EDWARD: oh, yeah. For sure for sure.
MENDOZA: ..... okay, fine. To save Nicholas (my eternal love) and Alec (sure) I will agree to the babies plan, if you agree to hold off on world domination for the full eighteen years it'll take to get them to maturity.
EDWARD: yeah all right, that's fine, I've transcended time with my enormous augmented brain power so it doesn't really matter anyway --
MENDOZA: you've what
EDWARD: Transcended time! oh baby I forgot your poor little normal cyborg brain hasn't learned how to transcend time yet, awww, that is so cute
MENDOZA: oh my god
EDWARD: but you still love me, right?
MENDOZA: ... on the one hand, what you have done is absolutely unforgivable. On the other hand, I still think you are very hot and your childhood was very sad. So ... my darling, yes!
So Mendoza is implanted with two clone babies of her one true love, and Edward decants the personalities of Nicholas and Alec into the fetal clones. They learn that this has been successful when Nicholas and Alec start telepathically shrieking 'BAD MAN!' 'SINFUL MAN!' from inside Mendoza's womb.
... and then the whole family -- Edward, Mendoza, and their two clone children implanted respectively with the personalities of Mendoza's One True Love and the guy she had an intense two-day fling with -- retires to a small private island, where Mendoza steals scraps of time around being a full-time mom to work on botany, and Edward gets really, really into Victorian parenting.
And ... somehow .... this fixes him? THIS FIXES HIM. He forgets about world domination! All he cares about is taking care of his kids, and writing his eighteen-volume parenting manual on cyborg child development.
The kids, obviously, have somewhat conflicted feelings about all this.
But it's fine! once they're eighteen everything comes to a head, and Nicholas goes and makes out with Mendoza, and Alec gets in a big fight with Edward, and this solves all their emotional issues and Mendoza has a tripartite husband again, two parts of which are her children and all of which have transcended time and space with their minds. Kind of like ... Mary and the holy Trinity? Get it? GET IT?
Anyway, after all this, suddenly they remember that the series has another plot, the internecine war between the Company and its cyborgs that every other character has been desperately struggling to resolve, and send Nicholas and Alec down to sort it out.
And like, I want to be clear: things have been happening about this. A quick summary of the other things that have been happening, while Mendoza and Edward have been Enjoying Victorian Parenting:
- Lewis, still in captivity, has developed a touching parental relationship with the abused daughter of his captors, who helps him warn all the cyborgs about a plot by the Company to murder them all with poison chocolate
- Joseph and his Neanderthal dad have enlistened the aid of Immortal Cyborg William Randolph Hearst -- the only guy in all of history to be made a cyborg as an adult -- to get together a Neanderthal army to destroy the Company and rule the world (Immortal Cyborg William Randolph Hearst helps by providing them with a lot of plus-size clothing for the Neanderthals to wear)
- every black character in the series is hanging out in one place in Africa, also getting together an army to destroy the Company and rule the world, but much less violently than the Neanderthals
- Victor's two evil bosses and their various evil cabals are putting together rival plans to a.) kill all humans or b.) save just enough humans to be useful household servants ... but first! they want Victor to put together an elaborate dinner party!
Victor does in fact put together this elaborate dinner party, and then uses his plague sweat to destroy BOTH evil cabals at once along with himself, while a string quartet blasts Mozart's requiem and the woman he secretly loves and whose long-lost husband he has just rescued from peril reads his final note politely informing her that he has always held her in highest esteem. Kudos to Victor, who fully nails the landing of his narrative arc with perfect aesthetics a crucial six hours before Mendoza and her tripartite husbands remember about the existence of the A-plot.
Unfortunately for everybody else, their narrative arcs -- as the various factions are just on the verge of a decisive clash to determine the vision of the future world -- are all interrupted by the descent of Mendoza, Alec, Edward and Nicholas from cyborg island heaven, who tell them that they're all being very naughty, all the cyborgs should stop fighting, and the Holy Trinity is in charge of all cyborgs now. Everyone gives up on their deep philosophical disagreements about justice and free will and kind of shrugs and accepts this.
Then Alec, Edward and Nicholas go around laying-on hands to all the injured cyborgs and healing them, except for the really evil ones, AND VICTOR. They keep trying to revive Victor and, sensibly, he simply refuses. His narrative arc is done! Stop messing with it!
THE END.
You may ask, do Joseph and Mendoza ever get to resolve anything? Well, Mendoza tosses Joseph a bunch of photographs of her clone baby boyfriends and tells him to appreciate these pictures of his grandchildren, and as a person who really truly deeply cared about the Mendoza-Joseph thread, this is one of the worst little twists of the knife for me personally --
-- OH AND ANOTHER THING, I had also remembered that after Lewis escapes he at LEAST gets invited into a brief fivesome with Mendoza-Alec-Edward-Nicholas whom he's been ardently writing his million-word fanfic about for so many years. This it turns out was a false memory. :(( NO orgies for Lewis, though he does get a nod as the Only Cyborg Who's Managed To Create Art even if the art he creates are absolute shit.
Also, his new daughter, Princess Tiana Parakeet, ends up hooking up with immortal cyborg William Randolph Hearst. ANOTHER TWIST OF THE KNIFE!!!
-- okay. Okay. I could go on but I have got to stop. This has been: the Company books! Thank you for going with me on this journey; I wish I could say that it's exorcised them from my brain, but, unfortunately, I am now all the way back on my bullshit and Despite Everything may be asking for Company fic for Yuletide.
