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While a growing category, serial novels are hardly unique to SF and Fantasy. In Mystery/Suspense the Travis McGee and Nero Stout books, to name just one of many, and Young Adult titles such as Little House on the Prairie, not to mention the endless Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys sagas, come immediately to mind. The late Patrick O'Brian's Historical/Nautical novels of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin ran to 20 volumes. Even so-called literary or mainstream fiction, such as John Updike's Rabbit novels and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, feature recurring characters.

But while SF and Fantasy didn't invent the sequel, it can claim the perhaps dubious credit for the glut of multi-volume (sometimes into the double digits) sets in which each new edition is a fat chapter of a humongous opus that makes the Mahabharata look like a short story. Typically, you won't entirely "get" the storyline if you read these books out of sequence or fail to finish the entire series. Whether or not this is a good thing depends upon whether the ongoing narrative is sufficiently gripping or meaningful to carry you along over the course of several years of reading.

Which brings me to Mendoza in Hollywood, Kage Baker's latest in her series of stories about the Company, a mysterious 24th century conglomerate that recovers lost artifacts from the past. Salvage operations are performed by a network of immortal cyborgs -- surgically-created humans recruited as children (the process is not suitable for adults) throughout the eons -- on the scene of various disasters to recover items just before, say, the Alexandria Library burns down or the San Francisco earthquake hits. Thus, the paradox of time travel -- whether going back in time can cause events that will change "the present" -- is sidestepped by using agents who are "of the time," though the time of their existence lasts for centuries, and who are careful not to alter the known historical record. According to history, the Alexandria Library burnt to the ground; by the 24th century, however, it can be revealed that the library's contents were actually salvaged before they were damaged and kept in safekeeping down through the centuries. Although the Company makes a profit by selling these "discoveries," it appears there may be other as yet unclear motivations of a darker and more devious sort.

Given that the series so far has gotten up only to the mid-19th century, it may take a while to find out what these ulterior motives might be. (Indeed, Baker's website reports that "several" more Company novels are planned -- presumably the next one, The Graveyard Game, is slotted for release in January 2001.) Thus, my frustration with Mendoza in Hollywood is that it is basically just a chapter, though a highly entertaining one, which I can't really evaluate until I've read the entire "book." Which is evidently a long way from completion.

Although it's the third in the series, Mendoza in Hollywood is more of a sequel to The Garden of Iden, Baker's debut novel. In both cases, we have a first-person narrative by the cyborg Mendoza on her unlucky love-life with mortal men. Mendoza appears only as a minor character in the second Company book, Sky Coyote, which has a different narrator and, in my view, is a much less successful story. (To be fair though, I seem to be in a critical minority as Sky Coyote has received many positive reviews.) After centuries of preserving botanical specimens in California mostly on her own, Mendoza is assigned to a stagecoach stop in an area that will eventually turn into the famous movie-making capital. It's a particularly clever setting in that it provides a structure for Baker to comment upon the coming age of the Silver Screen from the context of the Old West, itself destined to become one of Tinseltown's favourite themes. Making it even more eerie is the onset of regular "film festivals" of Company-supplied prints of early motion pictures, the highlight of which is D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, whose flashbacks and non-linear sequences provide the only type of time travel us ordinary folks are able to experience.

This is one of the things that Baker does really well -- using her extensive knowledge of an historical period to both provide interesting descriptive nuggets that ultimately reflect upon the futility and folly of the human condition. In fact, that's basically the underlying premise of the Company conceit. The problem is, it isn't always enough for effective storytelling.

Norman Spinrad hits the problem on the head in his Asimov'sOctober/November "On Books" column about In the Garden of Iden and the need for "closure":

    "For closure means, at novel length, a conclusion that leaves the main characters psychologically altered, maybe even dead, the fictional universe in which they have been operating either changed or seen in a different light by readers, ideally the consciousness of readers somewhat enhanced by a terminal epiphany.
    "All of which are anathema to editors or producers enforcing the strictures of a series bible... This tends to mitigate against the publication and therefore the writing of novels whose conclusions leave the readers' cozy conventional presumptions of what endings should be disturbed instead of pandered to, as real closure should.
    "It also tends to commercially encourage even first novelists, even excellent first novelists like Kage Baker, to conceive of even that first novel as the opening episode of a series... What makes [In the Garden of Iden] work as a story is that Nicholas [Mendoza's mortal lover] is a man at once intellectually and to a more limited extent psychologically liberated for his time and a religious fanatic extreme even for his time, giving the love story intellectual interest, irony, and emotional poignancy.
    "What makes the closure work admirably is that Baker faces the inevitable tragic outcome unflinchingly and has the courage to present it to the reader as such.
    "Unfortunately the novel doesn't end there. [My emphasis.]
    "Mendoza, who has undergone a tragically traumatic experience in extremis, is then reassigned to the Aztec era Mexico of her desire, where she is installed in a secret Company resort base that far outdoes anything in present-day Acapulco or Cozumel for grand luxe, and where she... is ready for the adventure of the next episode...
    "What this does, aside from setting up the next novel in the series, is make a protagonist who has been portrayed with some psychological depth as sympathetic throughout seem like a callow cardboard adventure heroine..."

David Soyka is a former journalist and college teacher who writes the occasional short story and freelance article. He makes a living writing corporate marketing communications, which is a kind of fiction without the art.