The Machine's Child (The Company Series #7)

A misstep right before the finish.

Well, this was the one I was waiting for, but I'm rather sorry it is. . . Plenty of plot happened, characters that had been sidelined got reactivated and moved into position, and there was actually enough time travel that I no longer feel guilty calling this a time travel series. (Though what happened to time travel being horrendously expensive? I guess only making the machines is expensive, because using them certainly didn't seem to be.)

Unfortunately, I absolutely hated Baker's rendition of the major characters. Mendoza as an amnesiac was fine, though without her memory she also lost the passionate ferocity that made her so winning. But in this book Alec became a caricature, nothing but the squeamish child of the future that he struggled so hard to rebel against in The Life of the World to Come; Nicholas Harpole's faith was broken and, while that's understandable, Baker's treatment of it wasn't particularly gripping; and Edward, who at the start of the book was the only man of the three worthy of Mendoza, maintaining both his adulthood and his faith in Reason, quickly degenerated into a single-minded fanatic. While I agreed with Joseph's assessment of Nicholas' type in Sky Coyote, I could understand Mendoza's love for him because he did cut a wonderfully romantic ideal -- but that ideal is totally lost in this book, and I was left wanting to consign all three of them to Options Research.

The worst tragedy for me, however, was that Joseph returned to the scene, and he got worked over far worse than Mendoza's loves did. He's been rogue since the end of The Graveyard Game, working on repairing Budu, and that time alone under Mount Tamalpais has apparently driven him insane. (How did his sanity hold up under 20,000 years of humanity's most horrifying acts, then break after only a couple of decades under the California coast?) The Joseph of The Machine's Child is a snivelling, whiny, twerp whose fixation on Mendoza is a bit creepy, and his father Budu doesn't seem like much of a prize either. I wanted to throw the book across the room every time a section from Joseph's perspective appeared.

In fact, many things made me want to throw this book across the room. There was a great deal of cheap conflict arising from characters not taking two seconds to talk to one another; Joseph appears to have completely forgotten about Lewis, who I thought was his friend; the Mars Two thing still just doesn't feel real enough for so many characters to harp on it (though to be fair, that's a problem with The Life of the World to Come, not this volume). It wasn't all bad -- I did giggle at Mendoza and Alec/Edward/Nicholas shopping in the supermarket, and in a couple other places -- but overall this was worst book in the series so far, and if it had come earlier on I don't know if I would have continued. But I have invested a lot of time in this series and these characters, and there's only one book left, so I just hope that the conclusion puts right the things that went horrible wrong here.

a reviewer

After recovering from a nervous breakdown caused by downloading the personalities of his two clones into his brain, Alec, Edward and Nicholas agree they must rescue the immortal botanist Mendoza. All three loved her in different time periods and with the help of Alec¿s AI Morgan, they find what is left of her in the chamber of horrors known as Options Research in 300,000 BCE. They defeat Merco who is in charge there, and take Mendoza to the ship where she gets the proper medical treatment.--------------- When she recovers, she doesn¿t remember Edward, the Elizabethan spy or Nicholas the sixteenth scholar who was murdered as a heretic. She does remember Alec whose body contains all three personalities and the four agree that Dr. Zeus, a cabal of scientists and investors, should be taken down for what the company did to her. They hip hop through time planting seeds that will bear fruit in the future by ending the company if their plan is a success.-------------- Finally field operatives know how evil Dr. Zeus is and the four protagonists and the AI, and at least one other group based in the future realize the company must be dismantled. There are some very funny scenes as the personalities in one body argue and bicker with each other as they try to be the personality in control. There is plenty of action in this superb work of speculative fiction leading readers to eagerly awaiting the next installment in this popular and intelligently crafted series.-------------------- Harriet Klausner

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