Books - The Graveyard Game

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	Books - The Graveyard Game

The Graveyard Game is the fourth installment in the series of science fiction time travel novels by Kage Baker concerning the exploits of The Company.

The protagonists of the series are mostly immortal cyborgs, specifically the botanist Mendoza, and the Facilitator Joseph. They were recruited as children to serve the Company in its ostensible mission to preserve artifacts from the past for a better future.

This novel follows on from Mendoza in Hollywood. The next volume in the series is The Life of the World to Come.

Themes

Like the second novel, Sky Coyote, this is a volume which fills in background that is not apparent to Mendoza, the narrator of the first and third books. The principal characters are Joseph and his friend, the Literature Specialist Lewis. Action starts in 1996 and continues through the next 250 years.

Joseph is concerned about Mendoza - he recruited her and more or less thinks of her as a daughter - but he is also trying to find out what happened to Budu, who recruited him and whom he regards as his father. Budu happened to have been an Enforcer, an 8-foot killing machine with mixed ancestry from humans, Neanderthals and God knows what else the Company used. Far from being monsters, Enforcers were gentle beings who only killed those who killed others.

Chapters throughout the book, all entitled "Joseph in the Darkness", seem to consist of Joseph addressing his father, relating events as decades pass between encounters with Lewis. At the end we discover where these conversations take place.

Lewis is simply in love with Mendoza. He initially contacts Joseph to try to find out why Mendoza disappeared in 1863. Through the following decades and centuries, he stumbles across clues to the Company's real origins, but in following them he may just be following a trail of breadcrumbs laid by the Company itself.

A major plot element throughout the book is that all the cyborgs have implants that transmit everything they see and hear to a central database. Much of the plot is driven by attempts to circumvent this.

Socially the book presents a dystopic view of the future. Not only does the U.S.A. fragment, California descending into anarchy, but the rise of extreme animal rights agitation and various prohibition movements means that in the future meat-eating, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, chocolate and all manner of other social and private stimulants are illegal.

In the future, Britain is somewhat resurgent as a country, despite being wracked by domestic terrorism. It also becomes clear that the Company's origins are there. People in general are not doing well, though. The population is declining in many countries, partly due to a rash of unexplained epidemics, partly due to disgust with the process of procreation itself.

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