Mega Bus Report: The Company Series by Kage Baker
Lucian: So, we're trying something new. A while back inkylj recommended Kage Baker's 'The Company' series to me, and we both have been reading the new books as they come out. So I thought, "Why not do one of those maga-Jacq team reviews?" So here we are!
inky: So, yeah, where to start? I started reading the Company series in 1999 or 2000, and assuming Baker's not fibbing, it's ending in a couple months. It seems like this is the right time to do a series retrospective, then, and then I can just do a regular review post of the last book.
The overall premise of the series is a pretty common one for time-travel books. Basically, 1) recorded history can't be changed 2) there's a corporation in the future which has invented time travel, but only into the past * 3) the corporation wants to make money off this somehow. Therefore, the Company (aka Dr Zeus) invented a way to make kids -- not adults, only young children, and only the few with the right genetic whatsits -- into immortal cyborgs: human in appearance but with super-senses, super-speed, and invulnerable robot brains. Those brains are of course programmed to obey Dr Zeus's directives to swipe all sorts of things and pack them away safely for rediscovery in the future, where they can be sold for zillions of dollars. This premise has been done before in numerous places, the time-travel-for-a-profit stuff if not the cyborgs, but what distinguishes this series are the lengths to which Baker develops the concept and explores the details.
Lucian: The original impetus for inky to recommend the books to me was that I was considering making an RPG in a setting with a secret group of folks with future tech secretly acting in a world with medieval tech. I had a few sources of inspiration, including that one episode of B5 (the season finale of season 4, I believe), a few 'Star Trek' episodes, and a dream I had that was a mash-up of Alias and LOTR. Searching for more inspiration, I found the Conrad Stargard books ("The Cross-Time Engineer" and following, which I'll probably write up on their own after I read the rest of 'em), more recently the "Get Medieval" webcomic. And, of course, these books. It's mostly just the first couple that are specifically set in a medieval time, but then they turned out to be good, so I read the rest. And it turns out that while the novels generally progress through time starting in the 16th century and moving forward, the short stories (collected in books, but generally reprinted from "Asimov's") skip around in time a lot.
So, right--what sorts of things does Kage do with the premise?
inky: Everyone thinks about grabbing Shakespeare's lost plays and so on, and of course Baker does that **, but what about gene samples to recreate animals that have gone extinct in the future? Or plants that turn out to have amazing commercial uses a la tamoxifen? Or videotapes of authentic performances of the Elysian Mysteries? Then you have to consider how to get them back to the future -- it's too expensive to send them up in a time machine, so you need to put them somewhere safe where they can be rediscovered later. Now imagine the headache of trying to plan out where safe places in history will be for 20,000 years, and shuffling things between them to avoid wars and famines and all the other unpleasantness.
Or consider that the first immortals made were produced from Neolithic hunter-gatherers just as civilization's starting, to protect them, help get agriculture going, and pack away some Clovis points safely for future museums to pay millions for. But what happens to those guys once civilization does get going? Isn't a caveman going to look kinda funny in 17th-century France, even with a good shave? And giving the "maybe you should think about retiring" talk to an immortal isn't going to go well.
This last ties in to the other great point of the series, which is that, eventually all the immortals are going to catch up to the present. "Present" is all relative in a time-travel book, but the magic year is 2355 -- none of the immortals have been told what happens after that date. Some of them expect they'll be mustered out and given the rest of time to relax in thanks for the excellent service they gave Dr Zeus up until then. But most are starting to build alliances, form their own cabals and conspiracies, and make their own preparation for 2355. (It seems like good odds that this preparation will lead to whatever happens in 2355, of course, but that just says that something will happen, not what; and remember, while recorded history can't be changed, there effectively is no recorded history after 2355.)
Lucian: Of course, a lot of this information is stuff you pick up over the course of the entire series, and things change in tenor as different reveals happen. I'm actually fairly convinced that "In the Garden of Iden" was intended as a one-off, with the whole Company thing mostly just there as an excuse for Kage to tell the story she wanted to tell. And then as time went on and she wrote more books, revisiting implications in her own mind and foregrounding what was originally simply background. I've found myself do this sort of thing, too--everything that's been stated is true, but you can revisit it from a different perspective.
As an example: In the first chapter of 'In the Garden of Iden', the main character Mendoza tells us, "Nothing matters except the work." And this becomes somewhat of a theme for the book, as Mendoza struggles between what she wants for herself and what the Company wants of her. And there's no moral ambiguity of the 'work' the Company would have her do--it actually is for the betterment of humanity. But while that's the Company's ideal, and while Mendoza does indeed believe it, later books start to question the motivations of different elements in the Company: do they all have humanity's best interests at heart? What might certain factions be up to, any way? These are the sorts of things that were irrelevant to the first book, but are at least not contradictory to it, and supply some of the themes of the later books.
inky: The context in which these themes play out is a collision of different genres. There is all the meeting-historical-figures business you'd expect from a time-travel series. Baker is big on Californian history, so we get a lot set there, but there are also plenty of chances to meet Jan Vermeer, Sir Francis Dashwood, Robert Louis Stevenson, and so on. There is the conspiracy and spy-gadget stuff as the immortals acquire objects, make drop-offs, and complete missions. There is the historical-irony-and-exploitation stuff as they gather in San Francisco for a last dinner in 1906 before the earthquake hits, or make a fortune trading coffee futures, or meet up with historical cultures before they're made extinct. There's the gradual revelation of just how much dirty politics is involved in the relations between immortals and other immortals, and between immortals and Dr Zeus.
And there's the comedy. Which I guess we didn't mention yet, but, yeah, Kage Baker is funny. There is a story which provides a perfectly reasonable explanation for why a village has this legend about a guy riding a giant brass chicken, there is the sharp satire of life in the future (consider all the modern societal trends, extrapolated two hundred years), and there are comedy-of-manners pieces like this bit, from a going-away party at a base they've set up in South America in 1650 AD:
Lewis turned and had made it halfway across the room when a Mayan waiter loomed into his path, bearing a tray of violet martinis.
"Cocktail, Son of Heaven?" he asked.
Lewis looked at the tray in horror. "Might I have a gin and tonic?"
The waiter shook his head, causing the plumes on his high headdress to shimmer gently. "The august Father of Heaven has ordered a special Beverage of Lamentation in honor of the departure of one of His divine Children from Paradise."
Lucian: Right, not so much funny ha-ha but humorous situations. Although I wouldn't say humor is the prevailing mood of most of the books or stories. Well, OK, there's 'Sky Coyote' which pretty much had me laughing non-stop. And some of the short stories have humor as their main focus. But most of the novels are mostly a combination of drama and an interesting form of centuries-old nostalgia.
inky: Yeah. The mood's overall getting grimmer as the series goes along, it seems to me. While there is a lot of comedy, the larger context is that the immortals are realizing that the way of life they've known for the last twenty thousand years is coming to an end -- the Fall of Rome is just an eyeblink of time compared to the march towards 2355. There's also more personal tragedy: some of the children who are made immortal have brothers and sisters and parents, and even the orphans find themselves making some attachments to mortals; so there are many, many chances to see someone you love die. Nor is life all roses for immortal-immortal relationships; if you develop an unrequited crush or have a bad breakup with someone in real life, well, at worst the pain will last for sixty or seventy years.
*And back to where you started from, presumably, though this is a trifle unclear.
**And that's not all they get -- in Gods and Pawns they get a glimpse of the author's notes for A Midsummer Night's Dream:
How yf a rustick brought in? None can fynde fawlt there by Jesu. Saye a weaver, bellowes-mender or some suche in the woodes by chance. Excellent good meat for Kempe. JESU how yf a companye of rusticks??? As who should bee apying we players. Memo, speake wyth Burbage on thys ...
Lucian: There are some other interesting things to talk about, but let's put in some spoiler space first. Any last suggestions for the spoiler-free crowd?
inky: If you'd like to start reading this, I'd suggest reading either the first book (In the Garden of Iden) or the second (Sky Coyote). In the Garden of Iden is a little darker and a little rougher than the series average, but introduces a character who's a major player later on. Sky Coyote centers on my personal favorite character but is somewhat less focused on the main plot of the series. You could also look into one of the short-story collections (Black Projects, White Knights is the first, and would be the one to start with) but understandably the short stories assume more and explain less; they're more useful when adding shading to the storyline formed by the novels. The novels basically start at the 1600s and march forward to (presumably) 2355; the short stories jump around and fill in gaps.
Lucian: OK, let's put some spoiler space in here...
So. One of the more interesting aspects of the series to me is how it deals with belief. I'd say that 'belief' can be pretty easily seen as the major theme of the first two books (though dealt with in completely different ways), and while after that it gets backgrounded as a theme, it still shows up now and again. 'In the Garden of Iden' on the one hand we have Mendoza's beliefs as an immortal: she's an adherent of naturalism, I think, and her devotion to 'the work' of the Company reminds me of Candide's "we must work in our garden" conclusion. And, hmm, given that Mendoza is a botanist, the connection might not be all that accidental. On the other hand, we have Nicolas, a devout Christian heretic of sorts whose heresy is that he's been pulled into some sort of cult revolving around sex. Their tragedy is that they love each other and share a great deal of their philosophical outlook on life and other people, but in the end Nicolas believes in God and is willing to die for that, while Mendoza believes in The Work, and is willing to let Nicolas die for *that*.
'Sky Coyote' similarly deals with belief, this time of a Chumash tribe in pre-colonial America. Only the Chumash are stand-ins for many of today's beliefs, really. The teenage girls even speak valley girl. The basic premise of Joseph disguising himself as 'Sky Coyote', rather surprising the tribe who believed in Sky Coyote, as most of them seemed to pretty much think of him as a fairy tale, or at least metaphorically, is rich with possibilities. I have two favorite scenes from this book, both of which make me laugh to remember them. One is where Joseph goes in to speak to the priests. He goes in and sits down, and it turns out he's accidentally sat on some sort of star chart. Immediately, the priests start arguing over What This Means. It means the star chart is unimportant. No, it means it's of utmost importance. His tail is pointing that way, which means this. And the whole time, he's *sitting right there*! But they're obviously so entrenched in this mode of argumentation that actually asking him what's up is beyond them. The other scene I liked was when he talks with the businessmen. They're confused about his story, so he tells them a different version, wherein he 'reveals' that the Chumash are essentially his tokens in a game he's playing with the Sun God, and this is a way to cheat by taking them off the table for a while. And the businessman breathes a sigh of relief because even though it's just been revealed that he's not much more than a game piece, it's in a context that he can grasp; that makes sense to him. The Gods may be fickle, crazy folks, but at least they're operating by a system he can understand.
And isn't that what we all do? We try to understand God (or The Universe) in terms that we can understand; that make sense to us. That we *have* a place in the Grand Scheme of things is ultimately more important than what that role is, or how important it may be.
inky: The religious bits in the series are interesting, since in some sense the immortals know less than humans about the afterlife because they live longer. Obviously a lot of them are pretty cynical about religion, but it seems like a surprising number keep to stuff they grew up with. The short story (from the latest book) with Lewis in the Hellfire club is an example of this, where he's a born-in-early-Rome pagan who meets up with some Victorian-era neo-pagans.
Baker often leaves things pretty open: the episode Lewis doesn't remember at the end of that story would be perfectly possible to read as actual divine possession. But, I mean, this is the sort of series where it might turn out he was given some nanobots in the gooseberries to control his behavior so that he'd do this so that something else would happen that would ultimately benefit the Company or some cabal within it.
Lucian: Ha! Yes. Depending on Kage's mood when she wrote the sequel, even. And even then, it'd be an oblique reference to gooseberries. One of the fun things about the books is that they lend themselves to re-reading, or at least a re-analysis, as you realize how bits of later books were foreshadowed (or were even taking place during) the earlier books. And if you don't have time to re-read them, there's always wikipedia. One book has two characters make a mess of a chocolate shop; in another book other characters go to a chocolate shop where the staff are busy cleaning everything up. Minor characters show up again in odd places, going through their own stories, and sometimes even get short stories written about them. It's all one big mess of a tapestry, and if Kage thinks she can wrap up everything in one more book, I am going to be surprised. Which means that probably the main things are going to get wrapped up and the rest left comfortably enigmatic, which is, on the whole, OK with me.
inky: One of the nice things about this series is it has enough characters to have some involved in each themes -- some are relative innocents just happy to collect artifacts, some are uncovering the truth about what the Dr Zeus is up to, some are engaged in conspiracies to Destroy The World.
One of the threads I do hope gets resolved is Alec; by this point in this series he's had two doomed and one almost-doomed-but-not-quite love affairs with the same woman, and when we last left off he had some interesting schemes in motion and was in a big mess. Clearly he's a major player but he's also very separate from most of the other protagonists -- it's going to require some work just to bring them all together, let alone wrap things up in any sense.
Lucian: I particularly liked the character of Alec, especially in early stories when he's a kid. Two books ago I found myself somewhat less enamored of him (perhaps because he seemed to spend half the time crying and/or throwing up) and in his last book he started to get on my nerves a bit. There's still plenty of room for him to redeem himself in the upcoming finale, but I hope to goodness he does. The revived Nicolas and Edward both seem a little... off, somehow. I'm not even sure what it is. For one thing, I'm not convinced Nicolas is really the same sort of fellow he was in Iden. And Edward mostly just insufferable, and I didn't ever understand his role in 'Hollywood' in the first place. (And in fact, while 'Hollywood' was interesting for its 'nostalgia for what's lost' motif, the actual plot of the book is "Nothing happens for 300 pages, and then tragedy strikes Mendoza for no good reason in the last 36. Again." Which was annoying. So perhaps I simply still resent Edward from his role there.) But whatever the cause, the conflict between the three of them seemed somewhat artificial and hollow, driven by characters that caused problems by being idiots, instead of by following understandably-misguided ideals.
inky: I think there is some minor implication that Alec's upbringing has biased him towards a black-and-white view of people, and it makes some sense that the constructs of Nicolas and Edward would be more single-minded than they were when they were alive (unless you believe that they really are 100% accurate simulations of the human version -- which has interesting implications for the What To Do With All The Immortals problem).
Anyway, there is a lot of cool stuff going on here, and I have high hopes for the last book. I have a soft spot for Joseph, so I hope things turn out well for him, but the future's so open it's hard to guess what'll happen next.
inky: So, yeah, where to start? I started reading the Company series in 1999 or 2000, and assuming Baker's not fibbing, it's ending in a couple months. It seems like this is the right time to do a series retrospective, then, and then I can just do a regular review post of the last book.
The overall premise of the series is a pretty common one for time-travel books. Basically, 1) recorded history can't be changed 2) there's a corporation in the future which has invented time travel, but only into the past * 3) the corporation wants to make money off this somehow. Therefore, the Company (aka Dr Zeus) invented a way to make kids -- not adults, only young children, and only the few with the right genetic whatsits -- into immortal cyborgs: human in appearance but with super-senses, super-speed, and invulnerable robot brains. Those brains are of course programmed to obey Dr Zeus's directives to swipe all sorts of things and pack them away safely for rediscovery in the future, where they can be sold for zillions of dollars. This premise has been done before in numerous places, the time-travel-for-a-profit stuff if not the cyborgs, but what distinguishes this series are the lengths to which Baker develops the concept and explores the details.
Lucian: The original impetus for inky to recommend the books to me was that I was considering making an RPG in a setting with a secret group of folks with future tech secretly acting in a world with medieval tech. I had a few sources of inspiration, including that one episode of B5 (the season finale of season 4, I believe), a few 'Star Trek' episodes, and a dream I had that was a mash-up of Alias and LOTR. Searching for more inspiration, I found the Conrad Stargard books ("The Cross-Time Engineer" and following, which I'll probably write up on their own after I read the rest of 'em), more recently the "Get Medieval" webcomic. And, of course, these books. It's mostly just the first couple that are specifically set in a medieval time, but then they turned out to be good, so I read the rest. And it turns out that while the novels generally progress through time starting in the 16th century and moving forward, the short stories (collected in books, but generally reprinted from "Asimov's") skip around in time a lot.
So, right--what sorts of things does Kage do with the premise?
inky: Everyone thinks about grabbing Shakespeare's lost plays and so on, and of course Baker does that **, but what about gene samples to recreate animals that have gone extinct in the future? Or plants that turn out to have amazing commercial uses a la tamoxifen? Or videotapes of authentic performances of the Elysian Mysteries? Then you have to consider how to get them back to the future -- it's too expensive to send them up in a time machine, so you need to put them somewhere safe where they can be rediscovered later. Now imagine the headache of trying to plan out where safe places in history will be for 20,000 years, and shuffling things between them to avoid wars and famines and all the other unpleasantness.
Or consider that the first immortals made were produced from Neolithic hunter-gatherers just as civilization's starting, to protect them, help get agriculture going, and pack away some Clovis points safely for future museums to pay millions for. But what happens to those guys once civilization does get going? Isn't a caveman going to look kinda funny in 17th-century France, even with a good shave? And giving the "maybe you should think about retiring" talk to an immortal isn't going to go well.
This last ties in to the other great point of the series, which is that, eventually all the immortals are going to catch up to the present. "Present" is all relative in a time-travel book, but the magic year is 2355 -- none of the immortals have been told what happens after that date. Some of them expect they'll be mustered out and given the rest of time to relax in thanks for the excellent service they gave Dr Zeus up until then. But most are starting to build alliances, form their own cabals and conspiracies, and make their own preparation for 2355. (It seems like good odds that this preparation will lead to whatever happens in 2355, of course, but that just says that something will happen, not what; and remember, while recorded history can't be changed, there effectively is no recorded history after 2355.)
Lucian: Of course, a lot of this information is stuff you pick up over the course of the entire series, and things change in tenor as different reveals happen. I'm actually fairly convinced that "In the Garden of Iden" was intended as a one-off, with the whole Company thing mostly just there as an excuse for Kage to tell the story she wanted to tell. And then as time went on and she wrote more books, revisiting implications in her own mind and foregrounding what was originally simply background. I've found myself do this sort of thing, too--everything that's been stated is true, but you can revisit it from a different perspective.
As an example: In the first chapter of 'In the Garden of Iden', the main character Mendoza tells us, "Nothing matters except the work." And this becomes somewhat of a theme for the book, as Mendoza struggles between what she wants for herself and what the Company wants of her. And there's no moral ambiguity of the 'work' the Company would have her do--it actually is for the betterment of humanity. But while that's the Company's ideal, and while Mendoza does indeed believe it, later books start to question the motivations of different elements in the Company: do they all have humanity's best interests at heart? What might certain factions be up to, any way? These are the sorts of things that were irrelevant to the first book, but are at least not contradictory to it, and supply some of the themes of the later books.
inky: The context in which these themes play out is a collision of different genres. There is all the meeting-historical-figures business you'd expect from a time-travel series. Baker is big on Californian history, so we get a lot set there, but there are also plenty of chances to meet Jan Vermeer, Sir Francis Dashwood, Robert Louis Stevenson, and so on. There is the conspiracy and spy-gadget stuff as the immortals acquire objects, make drop-offs, and complete missions. There is the historical-irony-and-exploitation stuff as they gather in San Francisco for a last dinner in 1906 before the earthquake hits, or make a fortune trading coffee futures, or meet up with historical cultures before they're made extinct. There's the gradual revelation of just how much dirty politics is involved in the relations between immortals and other immortals, and between immortals and Dr Zeus.
And there's the comedy. Which I guess we didn't mention yet, but, yeah, Kage Baker is funny. There is a story which provides a perfectly reasonable explanation for why a village has this legend about a guy riding a giant brass chicken, there is the sharp satire of life in the future (consider all the modern societal trends, extrapolated two hundred years), and there are comedy-of-manners pieces like this bit, from a going-away party at a base they've set up in South America in 1650 AD:
Lewis turned and had made it halfway across the room when a Mayan waiter loomed into his path, bearing a tray of violet martinis.
"Cocktail, Son of Heaven?" he asked.
Lewis looked at the tray in horror. "Might I have a gin and tonic?"
The waiter shook his head, causing the plumes on his high headdress to shimmer gently. "The august Father of Heaven has ordered a special Beverage of Lamentation in honor of the departure of one of His divine Children from Paradise."
Lucian: Right, not so much funny ha-ha but humorous situations. Although I wouldn't say humor is the prevailing mood of most of the books or stories. Well, OK, there's 'Sky Coyote' which pretty much had me laughing non-stop. And some of the short stories have humor as their main focus. But most of the novels are mostly a combination of drama and an interesting form of centuries-old nostalgia.
inky: Yeah. The mood's overall getting grimmer as the series goes along, it seems to me. While there is a lot of comedy, the larger context is that the immortals are realizing that the way of life they've known for the last twenty thousand years is coming to an end -- the Fall of Rome is just an eyeblink of time compared to the march towards 2355. There's also more personal tragedy: some of the children who are made immortal have brothers and sisters and parents, and even the orphans find themselves making some attachments to mortals; so there are many, many chances to see someone you love die. Nor is life all roses for immortal-immortal relationships; if you develop an unrequited crush or have a bad breakup with someone in real life, well, at worst the pain will last for sixty or seventy years.
*And back to where you started from, presumably, though this is a trifle unclear.
**And that's not all they get -- in Gods and Pawns they get a glimpse of the author's notes for A Midsummer Night's Dream:
How yf a rustick brought in? None can fynde fawlt there by Jesu. Saye a weaver, bellowes-mender or some suche in the woodes by chance. Excellent good meat for Kempe. JESU how yf a companye of rusticks??? As who should bee apying we players. Memo, speake wyth Burbage on thys ...
Lucian: There are some other interesting things to talk about, but let's put in some spoiler space first. Any last suggestions for the spoiler-free crowd?
inky: If you'd like to start reading this, I'd suggest reading either the first book (In the Garden of Iden) or the second (Sky Coyote). In the Garden of Iden is a little darker and a little rougher than the series average, but introduces a character who's a major player later on. Sky Coyote centers on my personal favorite character but is somewhat less focused on the main plot of the series. You could also look into one of the short-story collections (Black Projects, White Knights is the first, and would be the one to start with) but understandably the short stories assume more and explain less; they're more useful when adding shading to the storyline formed by the novels. The novels basically start at the 1600s and march forward to (presumably) 2355; the short stories jump around and fill in gaps.
Lucian: OK, let's put some spoiler space in here...
So. One of the more interesting aspects of the series to me is how it deals with belief. I'd say that 'belief' can be pretty easily seen as the major theme of the first two books (though dealt with in completely different ways), and while after that it gets backgrounded as a theme, it still shows up now and again. 'In the Garden of Iden' on the one hand we have Mendoza's beliefs as an immortal: she's an adherent of naturalism, I think, and her devotion to 'the work' of the Company reminds me of Candide's "we must work in our garden" conclusion. And, hmm, given that Mendoza is a botanist, the connection might not be all that accidental. On the other hand, we have Nicolas, a devout Christian heretic of sorts whose heresy is that he's been pulled into some sort of cult revolving around sex. Their tragedy is that they love each other and share a great deal of their philosophical outlook on life and other people, but in the end Nicolas believes in God and is willing to die for that, while Mendoza believes in The Work, and is willing to let Nicolas die for *that*.
'Sky Coyote' similarly deals with belief, this time of a Chumash tribe in pre-colonial America. Only the Chumash are stand-ins for many of today's beliefs, really. The teenage girls even speak valley girl. The basic premise of Joseph disguising himself as 'Sky Coyote', rather surprising the tribe who believed in Sky Coyote, as most of them seemed to pretty much think of him as a fairy tale, or at least metaphorically, is rich with possibilities. I have two favorite scenes from this book, both of which make me laugh to remember them. One is where Joseph goes in to speak to the priests. He goes in and sits down, and it turns out he's accidentally sat on some sort of star chart. Immediately, the priests start arguing over What This Means. It means the star chart is unimportant. No, it means it's of utmost importance. His tail is pointing that way, which means this. And the whole time, he's *sitting right there*! But they're obviously so entrenched in this mode of argumentation that actually asking him what's up is beyond them. The other scene I liked was when he talks with the businessmen. They're confused about his story, so he tells them a different version, wherein he 'reveals' that the Chumash are essentially his tokens in a game he's playing with the Sun God, and this is a way to cheat by taking them off the table for a while. And the businessman breathes a sigh of relief because even though it's just been revealed that he's not much more than a game piece, it's in a context that he can grasp; that makes sense to him. The Gods may be fickle, crazy folks, but at least they're operating by a system he can understand.
And isn't that what we all do? We try to understand God (or The Universe) in terms that we can understand; that make sense to us. That we *have* a place in the Grand Scheme of things is ultimately more important than what that role is, or how important it may be.
inky: The religious bits in the series are interesting, since in some sense the immortals know less than humans about the afterlife because they live longer. Obviously a lot of them are pretty cynical about religion, but it seems like a surprising number keep to stuff they grew up with. The short story (from the latest book) with Lewis in the Hellfire club is an example of this, where he's a born-in-early-Rome pagan who meets up with some Victorian-era neo-pagans.
Baker often leaves things pretty open: the episode Lewis doesn't remember at the end of that story would be perfectly possible to read as actual divine possession. But, I mean, this is the sort of series where it might turn out he was given some nanobots in the gooseberries to control his behavior so that he'd do this so that something else would happen that would ultimately benefit the Company or some cabal within it.
Lucian: Ha! Yes. Depending on Kage's mood when she wrote the sequel, even. And even then, it'd be an oblique reference to gooseberries. One of the fun things about the books is that they lend themselves to re-reading, or at least a re-analysis, as you realize how bits of later books were foreshadowed (or were even taking place during) the earlier books. And if you don't have time to re-read them, there's always wikipedia. One book has two characters make a mess of a chocolate shop; in another book other characters go to a chocolate shop where the staff are busy cleaning everything up. Minor characters show up again in odd places, going through their own stories, and sometimes even get short stories written about them. It's all one big mess of a tapestry, and if Kage thinks she can wrap up everything in one more book, I am going to be surprised. Which means that probably the main things are going to get wrapped up and the rest left comfortably enigmatic, which is, on the whole, OK with me.
inky: One of the nice things about this series is it has enough characters to have some involved in each themes -- some are relative innocents just happy to collect artifacts, some are uncovering the truth about what the Dr Zeus is up to, some are engaged in conspiracies to Destroy The World.
One of the threads I do hope gets resolved is Alec; by this point in this series he's had two doomed and one almost-doomed-but-not-quite love affairs with the same woman, and when we last left off he had some interesting schemes in motion and was in a big mess. Clearly he's a major player but he's also very separate from most of the other protagonists -- it's going to require some work just to bring them all together, let alone wrap things up in any sense.
Lucian: I particularly liked the character of Alec, especially in early stories when he's a kid. Two books ago I found myself somewhat less enamored of him (perhaps because he seemed to spend half the time crying and/or throwing up) and in his last book he started to get on my nerves a bit. There's still plenty of room for him to redeem himself in the upcoming finale, but I hope to goodness he does. The revived Nicolas and Edward both seem a little... off, somehow. I'm not even sure what it is. For one thing, I'm not convinced Nicolas is really the same sort of fellow he was in Iden. And Edward mostly just insufferable, and I didn't ever understand his role in 'Hollywood' in the first place. (And in fact, while 'Hollywood' was interesting for its 'nostalgia for what's lost' motif, the actual plot of the book is "Nothing happens for 300 pages, and then tragedy strikes Mendoza for no good reason in the last 36. Again." Which was annoying. So perhaps I simply still resent Edward from his role there.) But whatever the cause, the conflict between the three of them seemed somewhat artificial and hollow, driven by characters that caused problems by being idiots, instead of by following understandably-misguided ideals.
inky: I think there is some minor implication that Alec's upbringing has biased him towards a black-and-white view of people, and it makes some sense that the constructs of Nicolas and Edward would be more single-minded than they were when they were alive (unless you believe that they really are 100% accurate simulations of the human version -- which has interesting implications for the What To Do With All The Immortals problem).
Anyway, there is a lot of cool stuff going on here, and I have high hopes for the last book. I have a soft spot for Joseph, so I hope things turn out well for him, but the future's so open it's hard to guess what'll happen next.