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On Tuesday I got up, had breakfast, went to the post office to get stamps and mail stuff, went to work, reviewed barely-comprehensible code for a while, had lunch, and then, and only then, did I notice that I had forgotten to put my denture in. Then I went to the library, came home, straightened a bent tooth on my bicycle's front sprocket, and made dinner.
(So exciting.)
Listen - Alec Checkerfield's come unstuck in time. -- does not appear anywhere in:
The Sons of Heaven, Kage Baker, Tom Doherty Associates:
I bought this while in Toronto, left it behind, and then checked it out of the library again to have it handy now. To sum it up without specifics, a number of loose ends are not so much tied up as just trimmed and the edges hemmed back. Mendoza doesn't play much of a role in the wider events of the story, mostly because she's preoccupied with the daunting task of making an honest man of Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. The wider events of the story do get resolved quite satisfactorily, though. Among the threads of action leading up to it is one detailing the fortunes of homo umbratelis - it turns out the female of the species are a lot less dull. The Silence falls, right on schedule - as how can it not? - and hilarity ensues, both figuratively and literally.
Gods and Pawns, Kage Baker, Tom Doherty Associates:
I picked this up because I came across a mention of William Randolph Hearst in the previous book and realized that, whether I regarded them as supplementary materials or not, the short stories in the Company universe are part of the background of the novels. Thus I read "Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst", in which the period scenery is drastically more interesting than the ostensible story. "To the Land Beyond the Sunset" follows Lewis and Mendoza off into the jungles of Bolivia, in search of a biological mystery, which turns into something of a wild goose chase. "The Catch" is sort of reminiscent of "It's a Good Life", except that it concerns a defective immortal who is at loose playing his irremediably childish games with the whole world, but fortunately for the guy tracking him, the dog-vomit / fool-folly thing holds good. "The Angel in the Darkness" rather reminds me of one of Fritz Leiber's Change War stories, except that the ordinary mortal in this story has a rather closer relationship to one of the contending time-travelling immortals than just a drinking buddy. "A Night on the Barbary Coast" is set in between Mendoza's first and second doomed love affairs, and we see exactly why Sky Coyote has Joseph as its narrator. At this point in the series Mendoza is trying pretty hard to avoid being a person at all, and Joseph has a definite enlivening effect, much as, and probably largely because of how, she hates him. The last story, "Hellfire at Twilight" involves Lewis infiltrating the club of the same name, when its members are getting on in years. Instead of sinister or glamorous, it all just seems sad and harmless, with Lewis taking an impromptu turn as Hermes in a re-enactment of the myth of Persephone, which I recall seeing, in a suitably toned-down form, performed by some local college or high-school troupe when I was in elementary school.
