The Graveyard Game (The Company Series #4)

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The Graveyard Game (The Company Series #4) (eBook - First Edition) Pub. Date: 4/1/2007 Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
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The Graveyard Game (The Company Series #4) (Reprint) Pub. Date: 2/1/2005 Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
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The Graveyard Game (The Company Series #4) (1 ED) Pub. Date: 1/16/2001 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Overview

Dedicated to saving the future by preserving the past, the cyborgs of the Company now wonder if they must save themselves.

You wouldn't take Lewis for an immortal cyborg: he looks like a dapper character from a Noel Coward play. And Joseph-short and stocky in his Armani suit, with a neatly trimmed black mustache and beard that give him a cheerfully villainous look-you'd never guess that his parents drew the Neolithic cave paintings in the Cvennes. But what are these two operatives of the Company doing in an amusement arcade in San Francisco in 1996?

They're looking for Mendoza, fellow cyborg of Dr. Zeus Incorporated who has been banished Back Way Back. They're also trying to solve the mystery of her impossibly reappearing English mortal lover. Soon they will begin uncovering some extremely hush-hush stuff about what the Company has been doing with the cyborgs it no longer wants in the field.

With this fourth book in the Company series, Kage Baker once again takes the reader on a wry, intelligent, and absorbing journey into the future and the past.

About the Author:

Kage Baker was born in 1952 in Hollywood and now lives in Pismo Beach, California. She has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Centre and has taught Elizabethan English as a Second Language.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

This entertaining romp, the fourth in Baker's the Company series, continues the excellent premise: time traveling, immortal cyborgs who were recruited in the past as mortal children seek to enrich Dr. Zeus's Company by rescuing artifacts, artworks, information, endangered species and more. They've been doing this throughout the centuries, but now they're about to meet up with the year 2355, when their mission will end. Will they be retired with honor and rewarded for their service? Or is there a more macabre fate in store for them? Rumors about their future have abounded for centuries, and now the natty Literature Specialist Lewis and Facilitator Joseph, born in the Neolithic era, are searching for the truth, as well as for their missing friend, the Botanist Mendoza, who has disappeared, perhaps sent hundreds of thousands of years into the past, following her travails in the third book in the series, Mendoza in Hollywood. Readers unfamiliar with that novel (Baker provides a brief summary of the previous books) may wonder at the intensity of their quest, but Mendoza's whereabouts may reveal exactly what the company has in mind for the operatives it no longer wants in the field. Bouncing between centuries and locations (an interlude in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square in 2276 is especially amusing), Baker's latest stands on its own and will entice newcomers to previous titles in the series. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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From The Critics

When the cyborg known as Mendoza disappears out of grief for her murdered lover, fellow operatives Joseph and Lewis begin a search through time for her and discover some unpleasant secrets about their employer--Dr. Zeus Incorporated, otherwise known as The Company. The fourth installment of Baker's popular Company novels (In the Garden of Iden) spans centuries and includes stops in late 20th-century Hollywood and early 21st-century London, among other times and places. For series fans and most sf collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/00.] Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780765311849
Publisher: Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
Publication date: 2/1/2005
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 685,969
Series: Company Series, #4
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.68 (d)

Meet the Author

Kage Baker is best known for her time travel series about The Company, of which this is the fourth volume and, more recently, for her popular fantasy novel The Anvil of the World. Born in Hollywood, California, she has been a graphic artist and mural painter, a playwright, bit player, director, teacher of Elizabethan English for the stage, stage manager and educational program coordinator. She lives in Pismo Beach, CA.

Read an Excerpt

This is the fourth book in the unofficial history of Dr. Zeus Incorporated.

In the twenty-fourth century, a research and development firm invented a means of time travel. It also discovered the secret of immortality. There were, however, certain limitations that prevented the Company from bestowing these gifts left and right. But since the past could now be looted to increase corporate earnings, the stockholders were happy.

In the Garden of Iden introduced Botanist Mendoza, rescued as a child from the dungeons of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Spain by a Company operative, Facilitator Joseph. In exchange for being given immortality and a fantastically augmented body and mind, she would work in the past for the future, saving certain plants from extinction.

On her first mission as an adult, Mendoza was sent with Joseph to England, where she fell in love with a mortal, with bitter consequences.

Sky Coyote opened over a century later, as Joseph arrived at the research base at New World One to look up his protégée and inform her they had both been drafted for a Company mission in Alta California. Mendoza said good-bye to the one friend she had made at New World One—Lewis—and went with Joseph.

Near a Chumash Indian village she met a number of the mortal masters from the future, and was appalled to find them bigoted and fearful of their cyborg servants. Joseph learned unsettling facts about the Company that brought to mind a warning he'd been given long ago by Budu, the Enforcer who recruited him.

Why was it that, though the immortal operatives were provided with information and other entertainment from the future, nothing they received was ever dated later than the year 2355?

At the conclusion of the mission, Mendoza remained in the wilderness of the coastal forests, working then alone as a botanist.

Mendoza in Hollywood opened in 1862, as Mendoza journeyed reluctantly to her new posting: a stagecoach inn at a remote spot that one day would be known as Hollywood. There, near the violent little pueblo of Los Angeles (one murder a night, not counting Indians), she was to collect rare plants scheduled to go extinct in the coming drought.

Mendoza found herself now haunted by visions of her mortal lover, and she was giving off Crome's radiation again, the spectral blue fire of paranormal abilities that no cyborg was supposed to possess.

In a local spot known for strangeness, she encountered an anomaly that threw her temporarily into the future. There she glimpsed her friend Lewis, who tried frantically to tell her of an impending disaster.

Into her life came another mortal—Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, an English spy involved in a plot to grab California for the British Empire. Edward looked enough like Mendoza's first love to have been cloned from him. Mendoza abandoned her post and ran away with Edward.

As they raced for sanctuary on Catalina Island, pursued by American agents and bounty hunters, Edward began to suspect that Mendoza was far more than a coaching-inn servant. Mendoza discovered that Edward too was more than he seemed, in fact was connected to the Company in some way.

But before the lovers could solve their mutual riddle, their luck ran out. Edward was shot to death, and Mendoza went berserk with grief. The Company sent her to a penal station hundreds of millennia in the past—the preferred method of disposing of troublesome immortals . . .

Copyright (c) 2000 by Kage Baker, published by Harcourt, Inc. and reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

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PhoenixFalls

Posted February 4, 2010

more from this reviewer

A transition book in the series

I did not expect to be able to count The Graveyard Game for my challenge; I thought I had filled all the categories this series could fill. However, Baker makes a dramatic change to her series in this volume, and that change opened up a new category for me: she dropped the first-person narration and switched to third-person omniscient, so that she could follow both Lewis and Joseph as they took their diverging paths to finding the truth about Mendoza and the other operatives that have gone missing through the ages.

Lewis was a very minor character in Sky Coyote; no one will ever rival Joseph as my favorite character in this series, but Lewis was a nice addition to the mix, being very different from both Mendoza and Joseph. While Mendoza is passionate and self-centered and Joseph is cynical and a delightful mix of self-aware and self-deluding, Lewis is a gentle soul, artistic and romantic and not at all concerned with (or a concern of) the larger issues of Company politics and the Silence. He has also been quietly in love with Mendoza for centuries, so when he starts to get wind that something nefarious is connected with her disappearance, he forces Joseph to let him help.

This novel serves as a bridge between the first three Company novels, which were very narrowly focused around specific events, and the rest of series, which looks to be shaping up into a large, millennia-spanning epic. It also serves to move us very quickly from 1996 forward all the way to 2276, less than 80 years before the Silence that has caused such consternation among all the different factions in the Company. We get glimpses of the multitude of disasters that has depopulated the Earth and created the very childlike, Puritannical mortals we met in Sky Coyote; but Baker's focus is not on the world-building but on her characters. As Lewis gets more and more wrapped up in his investigation of who Edward Alton-Bell Fairfax was, Joseph is forced to confront all those things he had willfully blinded himself to for so long. The sections in his narration are the strongest of the book the same way Sky Coyote is the strongest volume in the series -- unfortunately, they are short enough that they can be set off in italics without risking eyestrain.

This volume does its job well, filling us in on all sorts of stuff Mendoza isn't aware of, but it isn't as emotionally satisfying as earlier volumes. It feels like a transition book, and should be read as such -- valuable in the information it provides, but not capable of standing on its own in any way. Those that have been titillated by the hints dropped in the previous three books about the Company will start getting their answers here, but those that enjoyed the previous three books for their narrow focus on individual characters and events may think that this is the point where the series jumps the shark.
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