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36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Company at the end of time, July 24, 2007
This review is from: The Sons of Heaven (Company) (Hardcover)
I highly recommend the Company series, if you enjoy witty, well-written, fun science fiction, ala Connie Willis (though I think Baker is the better writer). This is the eighth and final novel in the series, though there are side-books containing shorter forms.
Unlike most series, however, the publisher does not put numbers on them (e.g., "the first book in the Company series"). And you do really need to read them in order (though there are few you could skip without missing a whole lot, IMHO). Also unlike some series, the books do not recap what has gone before, really. So, beware. For your reference, here they are, with a brief subjective comment:
1 - In the Garden of Iden (The Company). Possibly the best of them all. If you don't like this one, don't waste your time on the others! This one explains the premise for the series. Start here.
2 - Sky Coyote (A Novel of the Company, Book 2). You can skip this one and not miss anything critical. It was just okay, in my opinion. If you like the Joseph character, read this one.
3 - Mendoza in Hollywood: A Company Novel (The Company) A neat book, and quite necessary to the whole.
4 - The Graveyard Game (The Company)Features Joseph and Lewis. Not really necessary, and not one of the better ones.
5 - The Life of the World to Come (The Company)Okay, I lied, the first book isn't the best one. This one is. Some people don't seem to like the Captain, but I thought he was a hoot. Who wouldn't like to have their own personal AI buddy looking out for us? Arrr.
6 - The Children of the Company (The Company)Less like a novel, and more a collection of stories/novellas, all about the bad guys. I wouldn't have minded missing this one.
7 - The Machine's Child (The Company)Though some reviews were negative about this one, I liked it. Necessary plot information here, too.
8 - The Sons of Heaven (the book in question) Finally! The answers to all are revealed, and very satisfyingly, too. Sorry to see the series end, but I'm glad to see I haven't wasted my time tracking all these books down and reading them. Which leads to another complaint about the publishers:
Why aren't these books available? The first one is very hard to find. The Science Fiction Book Club has been issuing the series in pairs, but as of right now the first two "omnibus" editions aren't available used. The last four are in print right now, issued as "Company Men" and "The Company They Keep."
As for the books themselves, I have only a few minor peeves. The author is from California, and has a background in Elizabethan England. Virtually every scene happens in one of these two locales. Gets a bit dull after 8 books. On the other hand, the authenticity of her language is wonderful in Garden of Iden.
The other peeve is that the "little people" are never explained properly. Who are they? Where did they come from? What is "the Memory"?
The bad guys (the evil immortals) are a bit cardboard, I thought. And the humans (non-immortals like you and me) of the 24th century are so pathetic it's a bit overdone. Surely it would be possible to empathize with the immortal good guys without having such simply bad enemies and simply stupid human race in need of saving. So, it could've been a deeper, more sophisticated series. As it is, the Company series is mostly a romp, and a lot of fun. I'm sorry to see it end.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
too many dei ex machina can spoil the broth, October 1, 2007
This review is from: The Sons of Heaven (Company) (Hardcover)
As the conclusion to the Company series, of course everyone who is following the series has to read this book, and it wouldn't matter how many stars I did or didn't give it; you'd be reading it anyway. That said, I feel obliged to warn you that it is NOT a perfect ending to the series. (And, I should point out, it's not necessarily the last book ever to be written within the series - only the last events to be written about.)
A few too many people develop godlike powers here, powers that there really aren't sufficient bases for. Budu and his enforcers flawlessly revived and with all their old skills and nobility, William Randolph Hearst being more all-knowing than ever, Alec, Nicholas, and Edward all turning into omnipotent beings... it's a mess. Oh, and an AI who *is* Dr. Zeus turns up, with a total lack of logic and continuity. And Mendoza remains the simpering moron she turned into, with an overlay of maudlin traditional mother staying at home and minding the kids, which is totally ridiculous. It's not Mendoza anymore; Baker should have just invented a new character for this, two books ago.
There are several new characters, by the way, of whom my favorite is Princess Tiara Parakeet. Don't laugh; she's a true heroine.
But the book does tie up most of the loose ends, and ties up some of them with great style. The dinner party thrown by Victor, to which Labienus and Aegeus are invited, is an absolutely superb section. And it contains one of my favorite little asides in the book - there are many references to bits of culture throughout the ages, especially music. Earlier in the book, there's a point where Edward asks the Captain to play some music, and the Captain selects something from "Edward's two-hundred-and-ten volume set of the best of the Black Dyke Mills Band" which will be unfamiliar to most of you, but to those of us who have been playing band instruments and going to band competitions for years, that's a great line - and my spouse sat up and said, "Hey, I want that set!" Anyway, Victor's dinner party has music on the theme of death, starting with Mozart's "Requiem" and going on to Liszt's "Totentanz," and then,
"With the salad course came the second movement of the 'Discworld Symphony' by Brophy with its outrageous flatting bassoons for Death's recitative..."
That made me laugh out loud.
If you haven't read the previous books in the series, then all the above references to various characters make no sense. And indeed, the whole book will make no sense - you've got to have read the rest of the series first. All of it. If you've skipped anything, you'll miss part of what's going on here, and if you've skipped the previous two books, which had flaws and moments of incoherence, then you'll be even more befuddled, so, flaws and all, go back and read them first.
Okay, so I didn't like how Edward and Mendoza turned out, but I do like how Victor, Lewis, and Joseph turned out. I enjoyed the book more than not, hence 4 stars. I guess what annoyed me most was that the mortals who were smart enough to set up Dr Zeus Inc were stupid in unlikely ways - yes, I know smart people can have their blind spots, but the complete incomprehension of the mentality of the cyborgs, by the people who created them, just isn't likely and nothing Baker says here makes it feel likely. The plot device that's supposed to kill the cyborgs is a really stupid plot device. And I agree with other reviewers that the epilogue is unnecessary and pointless. I did like that the peculiar blind spots of the hill people did make sense and had continuity with what we knew about them before. And if I had to choose the hero I liked best, I'd choose not Alec/Nick/Ed, but good old Preserver Lewis, blind Homer reciting poetry as he awaits his fate.
My recommendation: put on a selection of classical music that features the Dies Irae and pour yourself a glass of Black Elysium, to best enjoy the book.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I wanted to love it--and I did, for a good part of the book, July 30, 2007
This review is from: The Sons of Heaven (Company) (Hardcover)
Let's start with the epilogue, shall we? Look, the last line stinks to high Heaven. It's about as bad as my pun. Worse, really. The whole page is trite, unnecessary, and too predictable to be anything but just plain bad.
God, I hate saying that. I absolutely loved Baker's Company Novels. It's just that--well, I threw the book after reading the final line.
But, hey, you see four stars beside this review, yeah? So it's not all bad, okay? You have to have read the rest of the novels to really appreciate this one-but if you have, you will laugh, cry, and scream about what the cyborgs do and go through. Amazon describes the book as "convoluted," but I really don't think that that is fair. Kage Baker has been developing a short story voice for her series for some time now, and it all works to drive the story quite well.
I thought that a couple of the side-plots (they're not so much side-plots as they are logitudinal plots leading up to a single point) dragged on a little long, and there were a couple of unnecessary author-to-reader quips, but all in all each story line was engaging and--in the end--logically played out.
Back to the ending, but before the epilogue. At first, when I realized the direction it was headed, I rolled my eyes. But it actually plays out quite well. Everything ties together, and the last two chapters were very satisfying.
A couple of notes on another's review:
I disagree that the "bad guys" were two-dimensional. If anything, they were as conflicted and hypocritical as the "good guys." Further, even though they are all ultimately held to the same degree of accountability, there was a tiered approach to their motivations and level of immorality. Plus, given the several story approach of the entire novel, all the characters were a little flat.
As for "the little people," you must be forgetting the previous novels. It's pretty clear how they came about--without spoiling anything, I'll just say that the people in the Hill start out like every other competing "human" at the beginning of time, and that the Company had its hands in their development just as much as anything else.
All in all, Sons of Heaven was a very good book, but with a very bad last page. Save yourself thirty seconds by not reading the Epilogue, and you'll close the series with a very satisfied feeling.
**potential spoiler (not really, but kind of)**
But, hey, anyone else get the feeling that this may be the end of the Company Novels, but that the story could easily go on?
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