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The Graveyard Game

The Graveyard Game
The Graveyard Game.jpg
First Edition cover
Author Kage Baker
Cover artist Kelly Nelson
Country United States
Language English
Series The Company
Genre Science fiction
Publisher Harcourt
Publication date
January 2001
Media type Print (Hardcover)
Pages 288 pp
ISBN
OCLC 43615632
813/.54 21
LC Class PS3552.A4313 G73 2001
Preceded by Mendoza in Hollywood
Followed by The Life of the World to Come

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.

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. Over this period the world changes profoundly. Japan suffers violent earthquakes and sinks into the sea. Japanese society relocates to Mexico. The USA fragments into independent republics. Animal rights movements and other activists pass laws eliminating the consumption of meat, dairy products, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, tobacco and many other stimulants and foods. Los Angeles becomes an anarchic war-zone walled off from the rest of California. Terrorists use a nuclear weapon to destroy Belfast, Northern Ireland. Anti-gravity is "re-discovered", having been known to the ancient Egyptians.

Graveyards, both figurative and literal, recur as a motif in the narrative. Porfirio is introduced during a traditional visit to a cemetery on the Day of the Dead festival. The repositories where cyborgs, mostly Enforcers, are held in suspended animation, are a kind of graveyard. One such has its entrance inside a tomb. Joseph has to disinter Budu from an urban park, as neat as any cemetery, and take him to a repository for revival.

Segments titled "Joseph in the darkness" appear before and after each of the episodes described below. Joseph, apparently talking to his father-figure, Budu, fills in historical detail in the storyline and discusses his own motivations.

In Mendoza in Hollywood, the botanist Mendoza and her companion Einar were thrown forward in time from 1863 to 1996 in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. This is supposed to be impossible, but Mendoza is a Crome generator, a psychic who cannot control her potential, and Laurel Canyon is a focus of Crome radiation (explaining its attraction for certain kinds of people over the years!).


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