This collection of fifteen short stories features characters from Kage Baker's Company novels, including Mendoza, Joseph, Lewis, and the mysterious Alec Chesterfield. I really don't know how she does it - each story is entertaining, the world-building is splendid, and her characters are wonderful. I especially love the thread of dark humor that runs through her books. I hope she keeps writing for many years to come.

This is a fun collection of stories fleshing out the workings of the Company even further. A very enjoyable read for any fan of The Company novels.

The 'Company' sends its immortal cyborg operatives throughout time digging up extinct life forms, destroyed artworks, and lost writings--which it then sells at a handsome profit. BLACK PROJECTS, WHITE KNIGHTS is a collection of short stories about these cyborgs and about Alex, an alien lifeform that passes as human in the 25th century.

Author Kage Baker delves into the thought processes and 'emotions' of her cyborgs bringing a fresh imagination to the 'lives' of these once-human creatures. Reflecting Baker's California upbringing, a majority of the stories take place in the Pismo Beach area--from the days of Spanish rule through the gold rush and the 1930s up into the future.

Baker's future view, most clearly seen in the connected series of stories about young 'Alec' are of overly protective social urges gone dystopic--meat, cheese, alcohol, flour, and refined sugar are all banned to protect the innocent 'consumers.' Alec becomes a pirate of sorts, yet without the extreme self-justification and self-importance of, say, an ATLAS SHRUGGED. Among the cyborg stories, those hinting at conflict within the company are highly intriguing. After all, powerful immortals without equally powerful opposition hardly make for a competitive field.

Baker's writing is engaging and her ability to detail insights into contemporary humans by her glimpses into the 'lives' of immortal cyborgs located in our past is outstanding.

Kage Baker churns out another of her fantastic novels starring a group of immortal time-traveling cyborgs. 'The Graveyard Game' picks up where 'Mendoza in Hollywood' left off. Mendoza, having violated Company directives, is exiled to Back Way Back, many many thousands of years in the past. 'The Graveyard Game' relates the quest of two cyborgs, Facilitator Joseph (a main character from Books 1 & 2) and Literature Specialist Lewis, to find Mendoza and discover the ugly truth behind The Company's secrets.

Secrets like, what happened to the prehistoric Enforcers? What lies behind the mysterious date of 2355? And what happens to good cyborgs gone bad?

I love Baker's Company novels. They're well-written and easy to read. Baker creates enjoyable characters that stay within their parameters. They don't veer off into directions that leave the reader shrugging shoulders in exasperation. I enjoy the fact that Baker incorporates Cyborg characters from her other novels and short stories. It's fun to see how the various characters mature and grow over the centuries (especially watching Latif grow from a child to a cyborg).

Baker's novels are light easy reading. They won't challenge you, but they will intrigue you and more than likely keep you up past your bedtime. Recommended.

This fourth volume in the series is a considerable improvement over the last two. Things are coming to a head among the cyborgs employed (owned) by the Company, as time marches on toward the Silence that will occur in or before 2355. Mendoza is still missing, and Joseph and Lewis find ways to search for her -- and for the mysterious reappearing tall Englishman who caused her to go AWOL in the third volume. However, Baker this time introduces another extraneous and unnecessary element in the form of "fairie folk" who have been hunting Lewis for some 1,700 years. This annoying development smacks of deus ex machina. Well, we'll have to wait for the fifth (and probably last) volume to see if the author can bring all this together.

There's something wonderful about watching an author's style evolve. In her earlier novels of the Company, Kage Baker was clearly having fun, but at times (notably in Sky Coyote), she seemed to sacrifice character development for cheap humor. In her fourth novel, The Graveyard Game, she has proven to be capable of fully integrating the tragedy of her erstwhile heroine, Mendoza, with solid, complex character development.

The Company is a shadowy organization (officially called Dr. Zeus) that has mastered time travel and immortality, and the cyborgs they've created as a part of their immortality process are the stars of the series. Mendoza, the heroine of the first and third novels, is this novel's macguffin. Her arrest at the end of Mendoza in Hollywood is unknown to all but a few Company operatives, and when, in the year 1996, Facilitator Joseph (who rescued Mendoza when she was a child, and views himself as her father), and Literature Specialist Lewis (who has been in love with Mendoza for centuries) find out about the arrest, they set out to discover what happened to her.

Of course, since the Company monitors its agents remotely, and since few know what has happened, their quest spans hundreds of years, and starts to uncover the vast conspiracy that was only hinted at in Sky Coyote. Joseph already knew something was amiss -- the Enforcers, a group of Company operatives from the old days, when violence was a more common tool of the Company, have all vanished. Joseph's own "father," Badu, is among the missing, and he left an encrypted clue about his fate with Joseph (from which the book gets its title).

Lewis, meanwhile, is uncovering even more unsettling news about Mendoza's fate, and that of her second human lover, Edmund Bell-Fairfax. Events that had previously been thought to be coincidences now appear to have been contrived by the Company. And the Company itself seems to have dark origins that were only hinted at previously. As Lewis and Joseph delve further into the conspiracy, and as the 24th century (and the official creation of the Company) approaches, the book takes our heroes down a paranoia-laden path, as they find reasons to distrust both their human masters at the Company and even some of their fellow cyborgs.

Although Baker takes us through three centuries of conspiracies and tragedy (especially as we discover the fates of Mendoza's colleagues from the previous novel), she paces The Graveyard Game wonderfully, fleshing out Lewis and Joseph as genuinely interesting characters, providing some wonderfully humanizing (and humorous) moments along the way, including a delightful scene in which our heroes go on a chocolate bender -- chocolate having the same effect on them as alcohol on mortals. Lewis's love of Mendoza (and his obsession with Bell-Fairfax), and Joseph's anguish at losing both his father and his daughter, add a depth to their quest for the truth about who they are, and who they work for. This makes the tragic denouement all the more poignant.

Baker's writing style has come a long way over the course of four novels. She has moved from writing fun romps to writing some of the best character-driven science-fiction out there. With The Graveyard Game, she has proven that she deserves to be placed on the same shelf as such writers as Connie Willis, John Barnes and Nancy Kress. It would be a delight to see her shortlisted (and even winning) a World Fantasy Award in the near future.

In The Garden of Iden, Baker's first novel in the "Company" series, gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a future company, Dr. Zeus, manipulating the strands of unrecorded history for its own benefit. Unfortunately, it was too wrapped up in its dreary tale of misbegotten love in 16th-century England to serve up much meat about this intriguing concept, resulting in a depressing and disappointing novel.

But I'm happy to say that its sequel Sky Coyote follows through on everything that Iden promised, and is a rollicking good read, to boot!

Narrator Joseph has a rare view of the world, being one of the company's oldest Immortals, and his wry commentary on his peers, and on the mortals he interacts with to carry out his missions for Dr. Zeus. After a lively prologue in which he and Mendoza (dislikeable as ever, but more fun as a foil for Joseph-as-protagonist) are reunited, they head off to California in 1700 to "save" a city of Chumash indians.

Joseph's interaction with the Chumash is priceless: Augmented to look like their god Sky Coyote, he makes proclamations interspersed with peculiar reasoning, and works to convince the natives that he and his "spirits" are working to save them from a grisly fate. What makes it work is the light touch that Baker gives the Chumash, as they use modern slang and have true business savvy. They're not dumb, even if they are wrapped up in a religious system that seems peculiar to us. Baker always treats them with respect, which more than anything else makes them come alive as believable characters.

But best of all, we learn about Joseph's own history dating back to prehistory, and how Dr. Zeus has slyly been handling the Immortals over the last 2000 years, revealing some dark shadows which our heroes will have to grapple with in books to come. On the other hand, all of this is starkly contrasted with the bumbling, snivelling, pampered company mortals sent back from 2355 to oversee the Chumash operation. Which is the real Dr. Zeus, if any? There's a lot for Joseph and the reader to think on and look forward to, here.

The book is still somewhat flawed in that the Immortals are still basically an unlikeable lot, and Joseph seems like the only one of them with any character. Still, this complaint is small potatoes; Joseph's narration makes up for a lot.

Sky Coyote pays off handsomely, and has me looking forward to reading the next book in the series (even if the series could have a less bland title than "The Company"). It took me a long time to get around to reading this, after the disappointment of Iden, but I'm glad I did, and you will be, too.

Unlike many follow-up novels, *Sky Coyote* keeps the high quality of Kage Baker's first book in this series, *In the Garden of Iden.* Not only that, it manages to have an identity and voice all its own. *In the Garden of Iden* was a walk in both shadow and light, but *Sky Coyote* is a walk in the sunshine. It's pretty much hilarious throughout, and is told from the point of view of Joseph, a roguish 20,000-year-old-man with a very sarcastic and world-weary view of life. (Who wouldn't be sarcastic and world-weary after 20,000 years?)

The story combines Chumash Indian culture and legend circa 1700 (before the Spanish got there) with a bio-engineered Joseph posing as the trickster deity, Sky Coyote--a perfect mesh with his own personality. Along the way Baker does a witty parody of contemporary California culture, the current lack of historical/cultural perspective in our society, moral relativism, trendy ecology, pop culture, and Warner Brothers cartoons. Baker has a lot of fun, and so did I. But a warning: this book contains major spoilers for the first book.

'Sky Coyote' is my favorite Kage Baker novel...so far. It features Baker's wonderful time-traveling, immortal cyborgs (which makes her work worth reading solely for the sheer originality). Joseph, a cyborg facilitator, has the job of preserving the culture of an Indian tribe on the coast of California. Joseph's mission is to evacuate the tribe away from their present location, where only death awaits them, to one of Dr. Zeus's safety zones. But first he must gain their trust...and so he is surgically altered to resemble Coyote, the trickster god from native american religious teachings. It only gets funnier from there.

The strength of this novel lies in Joseph's interaction with the Indian tribe. Rather than portray the locals as indigenous and backwards, Baker represents them much as we are today. They worry that if they go off to Heaven with Sky Coyote, how will they make money?

Any description of the plot can't do this book justice. This is a masterful comic novel on the scale of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, or P.G. Wodehouse. One of the funniest books I've ever read. Highly recommended.

Before I picked up this book I had pretty much been down on my luck when it came to reading a decent sci-fi novel. Like any genre, most of the books are not written well and it's sometimes hard to find the few authors that are good. I finally hit the jackpot with Kage Baker and boy, was I relieved.

In the 24th century a company known as Dr. Zeus has discovered not only the means to time travel but also the secret of immortality. Whether it was right to do so or no, it used its time travel capibility to effect events in the past so that in the 24th century, the company rules the world. There were some scientists that had signed on to the venture with the understanding that time travel would be used to help mankind. In an effort to do this the business types at Dr. Zeus go back to different time periods and create immortal agents from humans of the time. The mission of these agents is to save valuable cultural artifacts that would otherwise be lost forever.

Flash backward to 1500's Spain in the height of the Spanish Inquisition. A nameless child of an impoverished mother is imprisoned wrongfully and is set to be tortured. An agent shows up offering her freedom. She takes it. She becomes known as Mendoza and enters the process of becoming immortal. The agents are in actuality cyborgs who are stronger and faster than a human. I thought it was really cool that while the world goes about its business there is a secret society of immortals carrying on their business in underground facilities, or in remote areas. Their business being to preserve some of man's and nature's lost treasures.

Mendoza is sent to England and the Garden of Sir Walter Iden who is famous for having the most extensive samples of flora in the world. Her mission: to catalog and preserve extinct plant forms for the Company. She also falls in love with a mortal and thus begins the real meat of the novel.

To me, reading the synopsis on the back of the book, I thought it would be boring. But as I began to read it reminded me of another writer whose plots sound boring but when read are real treasures. I was reminded of Jane Austen. This book is really well written, especially the historical detail and feel. Baker was a teacher of Elizabethan English so I don't think it was much of a stretch to write about this time. Which is ok. An author's first work is usually written in a comfort zone. Not a lot really happened in this book. It is more a character driven story in which the interest is kept by the interaction of different personalities. The only complaint I have is that the love story sometimes, but not often, gets fluffy. The rules for effecting the past seem a little sketchy too. Overall, though, the idea of the book is fascinating and the prose style is interesting. It was nice to see a sci-fi novel with living breathing characters and an author who is well on the way to mastering her voice. I look forward to the second book in the series, Sky Coyote.

Time travel is nothing new to science fiction. Even the idea of people travelling through time to preserve (or to try to alter) the timeline of the world is not new to science fiction. The idea of hiding in the shadows of history to preserve that which would otherwise be lost, though...

I was really impressed with the premise of "In the Garden of Iden". I thought the idea of a company that could make employees of 'indigenous' people and send them along ('along' mind you, not 'through') history to preserve plants, animals, art works, etc. only as long as they did not change history in the process to be a neat, if not revolutionary idea. Baker pulls off the idea quite well to in this book. She gives us a good feel of history unfolding while the characters of the book go about their mission in a country that's teetering on the verge of a new dark age just before it's greatest era begins.

The science in the book is well-researched. The history in the book is very well researched. Even the romance manages to push the reader into an interesting parallax between love and practicality. Surprisingly enough, the one thing that bothered me about the novel was the stipulation in the premise that people sent back couldn't change "recorded history". I found myself wondering what constitutes 'recorded history'. We as a race have so much difficulty sorting the fact from the lie and the myth in our 'recorded' history - even in the past century - that I wondered how valid an argument this could be. Perhaps it's an idea that she'll pursue in a later "Company" novel. I'd be interested to see what she could do with it...

All in all, I really enjoyed this novel. I blew through it like I haven't blown through a science fiction novel in a long time. While some of the topics it deals with are quite heavy, the overall read is really light. If you're looking for a fun, light book with a genuinely interesting premise, I recommend picking "In the Garden of Iden" up. Personally, I'm looking forward to getting on to the rest of the series...

Kage Baker's first novel concerns a company that controls access to both time travel and immortality, and whose immortal employees labor ceaselessly to find and save lost artistic, literary, biological and other treasures of the past. The plot of this book revolves around the protagonist's effort to gather samples from a garden of unique plants during the brief reign of Mary Queen of Scots. Baker writes in a clear, accessible style and her characters are well developed and memorable. For a debut, this is a remarkable performance that already ranks among the best of the time-travel and alternate-universe novels, such as Poul Anderson's "Guardians of Time" or Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee." Baker's narrative holds the reader's attention, and makes the book both educational and entertaining. The background setting she has worked out should be good for many more novels, and I look forward to them.

Of definite interest to fans of the increasingly popular "Company" series by Kage Baker, "Mendoza In Hollywood" is a good but uneven novel. New readers are advised to start at the beginning of the series with the enjoyable first Company novel, featuring their immortal employees (agents), called "In The Garden of Iden". Current fans will appreciate the book overall more than first-time readers. In "Mendoza", many interesting sub-plots are introduced, but too many remain underdeveloped. Also, Baker rambles on unnecessarily in several places, lengthening the work without significant substance. Better editing by the publisher could have strengthened this book considerably.

This book introduces some new characters without developing many of them greatly. One fascinating exception is the Company project leader Porfirio. Here is an agent of the Company who has had long-term relationships with his actual extended mortal family, an almost unique situation for an immortal. But other characters are left wanting, as if for future books. Instead of droning on for 22 pages (paperback version) in a scene-by-scene metaphoric description of D.W. Griffith's film Intolerance, Baker could have better used the pages to evolve more history about the Company in general, or to give the reader a more thorough development of her usually interesting characters. Baker has great skill in doing that, but under-utilizes her talent in several areas herein.

The final third of the book has better appeal, as we finally get to the reason for the story, which is Mendoza being united with her reincarnated, but yet again tragic lover. Also, Baker does a good job of weaving historic scenes of Los Angeles in its infancy, quite well done, especially for a Northern Californian. I was left wanting to hear more about the mysteries of Laurel Canyon, and other twists she leaves virtually unfinished. The writer can improve future stories by not succumbing to too many open-ended plot devices, increasingly used by modern authors to allow for future books and money-making writing opportunities.

I wanted to rate this book higher, as it was an enjoyable read, and I couldn't put it down when finally reaching the third (of three) sections. But too many segments of the novel go on and on without contributing, taking away from the action and suspense Baker is adept at creating. Therefore, this book rates at 3.33 stars out of 5.00, rounded down to 3.00. Read the novels that come earlier first, skip the part on Intolerance that serves as a long-winded metaphor for the lives of Company agents, and you will enjoy the novel better.

I love this series, definitely it's on my buy-in-hardcover-order-in-advance-first-edition list. Kage Baker has a fluid, supple writing style that conveys a lot while never intruding into the reader's awareness as overly mannered.

Big, themed storylines can be overwhelming at times, with the larger drama rendering personal stories as petty or trite. I haven't found that in the Company War books. Baker's overarching storyline has enough power to carry through multiple books and characters, while offering niches for more personal, intimate stories. Her characters are dramatic, deftly realized, and have odd enough personalities that I can believe in them as immortal cyborgs. That's an important point, since as a reader I am always aware that immortal or abnormally long-lived character will be increasingly alienated and psychologically different. I thought that Baker did an excellent job conveying that difference, especially in the later books.

Mendoza in Hollywood is a neatly told, nicely researched story. I don't know if it's the first novel I'd give someone to hook them on this series, but it's definitely a fun read.

that'd be difficult since the The Garden of Iden and Sky Coyote were both books that made me wake up out a reader's stupor. My main complaint with this book: 18 pages devoted to relating the plot of DW Griffith's movie Intolerance. Instead of insightful examinations of the human character (Baker's usual choice for the meandering sections of her books), this read like padding.

Still, the book continues to unravel the mystery of 'the Company' in a slow, tantalizing way. Unlike many contemporary SF authors, Baker doesn't seem to be writing a long series to ensure that royalties keep rolling in year after year. She seems to be releasing the bits and pieces of the overall story out in a controlled flow. These nuggets tantalize and start the thought processes rolling. This way, you the reader attempt to puzzle out the big picture. I felt myself becoming a Fox Mulder-like seeker because the way the books are written, you know that 'the truth is out there.' If it takes another 7 books to find, fine by me!