What a tangled web we weave, when time itself we must deceive

kw: book reviews, science fiction, time travel

Time travel fiction can get confusing. In the hands of Kage Baker, it is downright pathological. Her "Company" series of novels now numbers seven with The Machine's Child. Their story line plays right into any conspiracy theorist's most elaborate nightmare.

The corporately immortal Dr. Zeus has a near-monopoly on time travel. The principals of The Company are either immortal themselves, or near-immortal cyborgs. They have free access to all time prior to 2355 AD, which is a dreaded deadline that none can fathom.

Two individuals claim time travel, thus breaking the monopoly. The immortal woman Mendoza is a Crome, apparently able to move forward through time, where all machine methods only allow visits to, and return from, the past. Most frequently, she sometimes affects time in her vicinity. A mortal, but cyborged, man, her lover Alec, is immeasurably rich (aren't these heroes all filthy rich!), and owns a yacht, actually a dreadnought, which embodies the largest of the time machines.

This novel lays the seeds for the climactic events of 2355 that must—mustn't they?—break the hold of Dr. Zeus on his enslaved immortals and cyborgs. It takes Alec and Mendoza a number of visits to storage caches located all along the past time stream, and a greater number thereof to plant booby traps that will go off on the known date that begins The Silence. Presumably, later novels will unravel the mystery further.

In the meantime, Alec, and two alternate personalities that belonged to clones of his, their mental programming recovered from the distant past, wend their very neurotic (three kinds of neuroticism!) way towards some kind of mental rapprochement, while an immortal cyborg hunts him/them down. By the end of this novel, Mendoza, who had loved each clone in turn, over the past millenium, is sufficiently amnesiac that she hasn't yet realized there are three personalities in one body, making love to her in turn (not always politely).

I think I must have read one of the other Company books some years back, prior to beginning this blog. If it was as confusing as this one, I can understand why I waited for the memory to fade before tasting at the Baker fount again.