Sky Coyote / Kage Baker

 

Sky Coyote by Kage Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you are a fan of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book or To Say Nothing of the Dog, I think there's a good chance that you will appreciate the Company novels by Kage Baker. The mysterious Company from the future, where they have developed both time travel and immortality. Unfortunately, they can't travel forward to the future and immortality can only be arranged for the very young. So, they travel back in time, rescue children from fatal situations, and make them into immortal cyborg employees who manipulate the past to make a ton of money for the Company.

In this second book, we meet some of the future humans and let us just say that things don't look to good for humanity's future. Future human Bugleg explains it this way: ”People did war. Pollution. Killing things until they were gone. We could stay inside and not hurt anything, but the bad things had happened already.” As a result, they are terrified of animals, the outdoors, their ancient employees, even food that has texture. They drink distilled water, have a horror of caffeine & alcohol, are nauseated at the thought of eating an animal product, and they spend their spare time playing violent videogames to purge themselves of passionate feelings. They have limited vocabularies and no understanding of the civilizations that they are meddling in.

This reminds me of C.J. Cherryh's Precursor, where the returning ship's crew are similarly scared of the outdoors, revolted by food that has flavour and texture, and seem to have forgotten important human social skills.

I don't remember any questioning of the Company's purpose or methods in the first book, but I was pretty involved in Mendoza's situation in that book. This volume gives us a year, 2355, that it seems that there will be a change. This seems somewhat ominous to the Company employees and inspires a lot of conspiracy theories. Much the same as any big organization where change is rumoured. This is well set up now, so I'm hoping that book 3 will provide more detail.

Good adventures, intriguing relationships, and a mysterious future—what more entertainment could you ask for?

Book number 395 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.



View all my reviews