Sky Coyote

I ought to be writing a positive review of 'Sky Coyote'. It's original, surprising and clever. The ideas are huge and complex. There's a vein of quiet humour through the whole thing and, underneath that a growing sense of alienation from The Company. The characters and the overall story arc move forward and we get a richly imagined historical setting.

Sounds like great Science Fiction doesn't it? And, in its way, it is great Science Fiction. It just isn't great Science Fiction that I could enjoy.

I struggled to become engaged with the story or the people in it. I think that was mostly because Facilitator Jackson tells the story in a sort of tongue-in-cheek folk myth mode. I can see that this is partly because it matches the fake Sky show more Coyote persona that he has taken on and partly because it echoes his own growing alienation from his work and with the people driving The Company. Whatever the reason, the effect it had on me was to keep me at an emotional distance from the story. I stayed interested in the growing doubts about The Company but in a 'hurry up and get on with it' kind of way. I found some of the 'this is how I tricked an entire tribe into believing I was their God and convinced them to walk away from everything they knew and become Company assets' a little tedious. It was clever but bloodless.

At the end of the book, I found myself admiring Kage Baker's vision and imagination but not feeling a strong urge to continue with the series, especially as the next book is set in Hollywood and so is almost bound to be another exercise in gaslighting. show less

So, this book is probably in my top 5 now. Kage Baker has an amazing writing style, and when she isn't writing sulky, lame main characters (cough, Mendoza, cough) her books are awesome. The world-building in this book is awesome, and the unfolding Company backstory is fascinating. So good. When I finished the book I wanted to write the late Kage Baker a thank you letter, but she is gone, alas. Must Read!

. #2 in The Company fantasy series. Botanist Mendoza fades a little to the background in this story that features mainly Joseph, the old immortal who recruited her for The Company, which is a conglomerate from the twenty-fourth century that creates immortals and time-travels them backwards in history. They aren’t allowed to affect *recorded* history, but unrecorded history they can have a field day with—and they do! Joseph is an old immortal, having been essentially a cave man’s son whose clan was all slaughtered by another clan. He was rescued and turned immortal and has had numerous ‘assignments’ which generally mean a few decades or centuries spent here or there. In this episode, he (and Mendoza and a large support crew) show more are sent to 1700’s California to a small village of the Chumash tribe, where their assignment is to move the entire village and surrounding area to a Company-managed spot in space for study and preservation. Joseph is given special implants (tail, teeth, fur) and is sent to earth as Sky Coyote, the long-absent God of the Chumash, to effect their cooperation with this transfer. What ensues is a rather hilarious tale of how man has always been man and the more humans change, the more they stay the same. Very enjoyable trek back (and forward) in time—this one was much more humorous than I remember the first book being, but there are important messages underlying the humor too. First rate fiction! A. show less

I don't know what to think about this book.

Baker was clearly a very good writer, and it shows in this book. But half the time this volume reminded me of nothing so much as a bunch of kids sitting around in a basement playing Dungeons and Dragons - badly. She introduces us to a primitive culture that has everything we do except electricity. The dialog used in many situations could have been from a poorly written children's book.

The only thing that saves it is the ending. Not what happens, but what we learn about the narrator. There are reasons why he would tell the story the way he did. But the preceding 30 or so chapters are so annoying, getting to that point is difficult.

(Amy) And I return to the world of the Company, this time seen from the perspective of the man who recruited Mendoza, Joseph. Mendoza is here, too, sulking in the background from the unpleasant things that befell her in the previous book. Here, the goal is to save a Native American village from destruction by encroaching Europeans, and to that end, Joseph is tricked out to look remarkably like a human/coyote hybrid, perfect for playing the role of their patron god, Coyote.

I laughed out loud at least a dozen times while reading this book, which is a bit of a review in itself. It's not a comic tale, but the little comedies of mundane life are told in such a compelling fashion as to be utterly irresistible.

Revealed in the background of show more this book are some dark hints about the nature of the Company and the future of the agents currently in the field. Joseph, in fact, is carrying a dark secret about in his head that not even he knows - though he does know it's there.

I must confess, I got sufficiently caught up in the metaplot that I have not waited as long between installments of a series as I usually do, and there will be another Company book review forthcoming soon. This is good stuff, people.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2008/03/sky-coyote-kage-baker.h... ) show less

1999
January 18, 2015

The library didn't have The Garden of Iden in, but after a dinner conversation in which the Spouse and I commented on the Company premise, I was hankering for a re-read. So, I started with the second book.

Okay, a little backstory: there is time travel, but only to the past and returning, never to the future. The Company controls the technology and is using it to rescue lost artifacts from the past, make canny investments, etc., and for the copious work it is much easier to rescue orphans, cyborg them up to perfect health and immortality, and simply let them live forward, working all the while.

As in Iden, this story features Mendoza (a botanist) and Joseph (a fixer). This mission is to Alta California before the show more missions arrive, where an entire village of 300 or so people are interviewed, recorded, and finally, transported out, culture and all. Joseph has been fixed up with some clever special effects so that he appears as The Coyote. There is much bawdiness and humor and humanity. Baker never condescends to her made-up tribe, never depicts their speech as pidgin English. When Joseph tries to pass off an earthquake as angry gods, the people are rather taken aback: they figured it was a purely natural phenomena.

I loved it, particularly the respect for a non-European culture. Funny thing though, I don't think it would pass the Bechdel test, since the leaders of the village are all men, and we don't meet many of the women.

Library copy. show less

another entertaining and thought-provoking novel about the Company (Dr. Zeus); this is the 2nd book. I really liked the first - Garden of Iden, which focused more on Mendoza. I read a couple of short stories after Garden including one about Mendoza very near (in time and space) to Sky Coyote.
Sky Coyote has more irreverent humor than Garden and more backstory (or at least more hints of the backstory) for the Company. Reading this one has made me eager to read Mendoza in Hollywood