The Machine's Child (Company) [Hardcover]

Kage Baker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Company | Publication Date: September 19, 2006

Kage Baker's trademark series of SF adventure continues now in a direct sequel to The Life of the World to Come. Mendoza was banished long ago, to a prison lost in time where rebellious immortals are "dealt with." Now her past lovers: Alec, Nicholas, and Bell-Fairfax, are determined to rescue her, but first they must learn how to live together, because all three happen to be sharing Alec's body. What they find when they discover Mendoza is even worse than what they could imagined, and enough for them to decide to finally fight back against the Company.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Baker's fast-paced new Company novel, the sequel to The Life of the World to Come (2004), Alec Checkerfield shares his cyborg body uncomfortably with the Recombinant personalities of 19th-century spy Edward Bell-Fairfax and 16th-century scholar Nicholas Harpole. Each man, in his own time, worked for—and was betrayed by—Dr. Zeus Inc. (aka the Company), which uses time travel to recover and hoard important historical artifacts. In their quest to destroy the Company, Checkerfield and his unlikely partners must rescue Mendoza, an immortal female cyborg and Company botanist each fell in love with in his own time, from a Company torture facility. Though Mendoza herself is more plot device than character, Baker invests the book with plenty of inventive energy and absurdity. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Mendoza's three lovers inhabit the body of one--Alec--uneasily, for all they agree on is loving Mendoza. Alec's pirate AI, Captain Morgan, aims to rescue Mendoza from the Company's prison for immortals, where, although it is nearly impossible to kill an inmate, the guard has been persistent, and Mendoza has been almost destroyed. Still, she is healed, albeit with extremely significant gaps in her memory. Between Alec's enemies chasing the rescue party and Morgan's daring plans leading to many Company facilities and tantalizing information about the cloning program that created Alec, a lovely addition to the Company saga. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765315513
• ISBN-13: 978-0765315519
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,458,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best in the series, September 23, 2006

By 

Wes Parker (Charlotte, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Machine's Child (Company) (Hardcover)

(No spoilers for the current book in this review, but if you haven't read the series and don't want to be spoiled for it, read no further.)

I've been eagerly awaiting books about The Company since Baker's In the Garden of Iden, and would rate all the previous novels in this series as 5s. I love Baker for her powerful prose and intense characterizations. Unfortunately, while Baker takes the reader at a breakneck pace through various times and places in The Machine's Child, she neglects the careful character development she has shown in earlier novels, and her sometimes breathtaking prose style is nowhere to be seen. The complex and conflicted Facilitator Joseph is reduced to a cartoon of the Immortal we saw in previous novels. Mendoza, although she figures in the story, seems to be more a plot convenience than the tragic, sometimes exasperating Bontanist Mendoza of Garden and Mendoza in Hollywood. Other characters such as Budu, Suleyman, Nan, Latif, and Nefer make appearances, but they are mostly cameos, and do little to move this book along.

Most of the book is given over to the Alec/Edward/Nicholas menage, with Baker beating the Technology/Reason/Faith mantra to death. Kage's idea in the previous book of the three men being prototypes of a New Enforcer type was clever; jamming them into Alec's body, not so much. That becomes tiring in this book. In fact, after the first few chapters, nothing really happens in this book. There's action, romance, tragedy, betrayal, blah, blah, blah, but none of it moves the story toward a real conclusion: it feels more like Baker is setting the stage for yet another novel, after yet another collection of Company short stories is published.

Serial novels are fine, but The Company Series is starting to feel a little like The X-Files: a lot of sound and fury, leading to nothing but a muddle in the end. It's time for Baker to find a way to the end of this story, and start another.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This should have been short stories rather than being a novel, February 3, 2007

By 

R. Kelly Wagner "[e-mail]" (MD, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Machine's Child (Company) (Hardcover)

I've been reading this series since day 1, and of course we all are anxious to find out what happens next. But this book won't tell you.

First, let me say that if you haven't read the rest of the series, this book would be totally incomprehensible; if the title popped up on your recommended list or you saw it and thought it looked interesting, but you haven't read the previous books, you would find it a complete jumble with unexplained characters, and the plot would have no detectable beginning or end. That said, if you are someone who HAS been following the series, you would still find it almost that jumbled!

I finally decided, after a few chapters, to regard this as a set of short stories that happen to be interleaved; that way, I could read and enjoy some of the brilliant scenes, and the humor, without being annoyed at the way some characters have changed personality, and without being annoyed at the way we don't actually reach the end.

Some of the things I did like about this volume:
*Joseph's enjoyment of being a Rogue Cyborg (which he thinks of complete with those capital letters).
*The very strange David Reed, and his very strange office.
*The scene where Nicolas breaks into Latin, at seeing Mendoza; as someone old enough to remember when Catholic prayers were in Latin, I recognized what he was saying, and I will tell you that if you try to translate it merely as words, you won't get the full emotional impact of that scene. What he is saying is an extremely well-known and powerful prayer usually addressed to the Virgin Mary.
*Suleyman and Latif, who at this point seem to be the only cyborgs still working for the good of humanity (that's not giving away much, since if you read the previous couple of volumes you already know that.)

Some of the things that I didn't like one bit:
*Mendoza as a besotted idiot.
*The improbable, difficult-to-accept-even-with-suspension-of-disbelief, threefold nature of Alec's personality with Nicolas and Edward; I didn't like the way this was shaping up when it first appeared, two books ago, and I like it even less now.
*The way the ending leaves us nowhere, pretty much where we were at the beginning, like watching Wagner's Ring Cycle for 20 hours only to find ourselves back in the River Rhine with a lump of gold. We jump back and forth in time, we get up to 2352, but we're actually no closer to 2355 than we were at the end of the plot in the previous book. Far too much is left unresolved.

In short: if you're following the series, you sorta have to read this one - but read it in small doses, and be prepared for being left unsatisfied. Enjoy the humor where it occurs, and then turn your brain off the book until there's another one, 'cause there's no particular food for thought here.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Whose Mendoza is this??, January 10, 2007

By 

S. DeMers (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Machine's Child (Company) (Hardcover)

*warning: minor spoilers
Well, I love these books--great premise, wonderful quick-witted writing. But this one is puzzling--where is Mendoza? In this installment, she is nothing but a fluffy-headed giggling girl who wants to have sex all the time. I kept waiting for her superior intelligence to kick in, recover some memories, figure stuff out. I thought it would happen after she finally met up with Joseph--but no questions from her about who this guy is, what he was talking about when he mentioned the block on her memory, just more giggling & sexcapades. "okay Alec, whatever you say Alec"
tiresome. Hopefully the final book will revive these characters.