Man versus machine in a bleak but fantastical future

Just don’t call it Armageddon. The climactic battle in the 12th and final volume of Kage Baker’s science-fiction saga of the Company (a.k.a. Dr. Zeus Incorporated) is little more than a noisy skirmish. It gets rid of some of the bad guys but isn’t a permanent, definitive victory of good over evil. It’s waged with Neolithic flint axes as well as with advanced technology. And it takes place on the unlikeliest of battlefields -- laid-back Santa Catalina Island.

That’s where the 24th century humans who have created the Company hole up in a fortified bunker. They’ve lost control over the cyborgs they created to travel back in time and scour the past for artifacts worth saving from extinction -- plant varieties, passenger pigeons, lost Jan Vermeer paintings. It seemed a laudable project at first, but the cyborgs, who did all the work, couldn’t help noticing that the humans reaped the profits.

Fearing rebellion, the humans, grown flabby and dependent, have tried more than once to get rid of the cyborgs, but the cyborgs were designed to be immortal -- and now they are mightily peeved. Meanwhile, as the Silence approaches, various cyborg factions jockey for power, led by single-named entities Baker’s fans will recall from previous books: Joseph, Victor, Suleyman, Aegeus, Labienus.

What is the Silence? It begins July 9, 2355. It may be the end of the world, or it may just be the end of human hegemony. All the cyborgs know is that none of the future events humans have let them glimpse will occur beyond that date.

As the cynical Joseph says, “We’re indestructible, and we can out-think them. The only advantage they’ve got is, they know everything that’s going to happen up to 2355 and we don’t. Kind of levels the playing field, huh? But it also gives us hope, Mr. Hearst. See -- what if we’re what happens after 2355?”

Yes, you read that right. William Randolph Hearst is one of Baker’s characters, resurrected to dwell again in his castle at San Simeon and dumb down the news consumed by the human public to levels today’s media moguls can only dream of.

Hearst negotiated with the Company for his immortality in one of the eight stories collected earlier this year in the 11th volume of the series, “Gods and Pawns,” which is far from the worst introduction to Baker’s work. The stories are erudite, inventive and often moving; they range from the jungles of 17th century Bolivia to the “Hellfire Club” of 18th century England to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast in 1850 to modern-day Los Angeles. Baker, a Pismo Beach resident who taught period dialects to actors during a 20-year theatrical career before she turned to fiction writing, makes good use of her skill at mimicry.

“The Sons of Heaven,” in contrast, is a bit of a slog, as series-ending books tend to be. The first three-quarters of it is literary plumbing--screwing lengths of pipe together to channel all the narrative streams into a single main that leads to Catalina. Baker’s heroine, cyborg botanist Mendoza, comes up with an ingenious plan to distract her lover, Victorian superhero Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, from his fantasies of world domination while bringing back to life the two other men she has loved over the ages: Nicholas Harpole, a 16th century religious martyr; and Alec Checkerfield, victim of a botched attack on a Company installation on Mars. Her solution is to give birth to the latter two, obliging Edward to be the dad of his rivals. The Oedipal implications are dizzying.

Meanwhile, Lewis, the gentle cyborg who loves Mendoza in vain and whose mission is to preserve all the world’s literature, is the captive of a stunted breed of humans who live in a cave-riddled hill in Ireland like bees in a hive. The Company turned him over to them to see if they could find a way to kill him -- after which the method could be used on other cyborgs. Lewis isn’t dead, but he’s in bad shape. His only hope is the magic of the stories he tells to an imperious little girl who calls herself Princess Tiara Parakeet.

It’s all too complex to outline here, but the plot isn’t really the point. Stories about cyborgs and the ennui of eternal life are nothing new; time travel has been a staple of science fiction ever since H.G. Wells. The point is that Baker’s mind is an interesting place to visit.

She’s a fine prose stylist with a skeptical intelligence and a black sense of humor. What the series may lack in theological pretentiousness -- the cyborgs, having never died, know no more about the Great Beyond than the rest of us do -- it makes up for in zest and wit, even as it glances chillingly at history’s horrors. Journalism, aesthetic fashion, capitalism and 24th century extremes of political correctness are satirized. We’re left with an admonition that humans had best muddle through life on our own without relying on false gods -- especially the ones we make up ourselves.

Michael Harris is a critic and the author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”

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The Sons of Heaven

A Novel

Kage Baker

Tor Books: 432 pp., $25.95