I think this is the next to last installment in the Company stories. Can't say I love the cover illustration, but the interweaving stories were fun. Alec is a crazy mess and poor Mendoza kind of sleep-walked (slept-walked) through most of it. There were some nightmarish bits and some funny bits, as usual. (October 15, 2006) ( )

This direct sequel to “The Life of the World to Come” picks up seamlessly from that previous novel. In this book, Alec Checkerfield, the genetically modified human and his technically dead genetic twins who now share his body, continue their search for the cyborg Mendoza in order to rescue her from the Company’s version of the Inquisition. The three “brothers” do not always get along but they are seemingly united in their love of Mendoza and their desire to take down the Company. The “internal” conflict between three men sharing one body can be pretty amusing. ( )

he latest in a long line of Company novels, this book brings us onto the cusp of the Great Silence of 2355, when presumably something of cataclysmic proportions happens to either the Company cyborgs, or their devious masters at Dr. Zeus. The novel mostly concerns Alec’s uneasy truce with his two past selves, who now share his body, and his life with an amnesiac Mendoza . Mendoza and Alec have fallen in love four times now, but this is the first time that Mendoza did not have the upper hand. Always before she had far more training and knowledge; now the power dynamic is shifted, and it’s nice to see the switch. Other than that, little of import happens. This is the second Company novel that feels stalled, but I hope it’s the last. ( )

I've been working my way through this series slowly. (No rush now, since there's no more to come... :-( )
The last few entries into the series have been wildly divergent, focusing on different characters, times, and places - but with 'The Machine's Child,' the different strands of this time-travel story rejoin.

The botanist Mendoza's three true loves: the 23rd-century aristo Alec Checkerfield, the Elizabethan religious zealot Nicholas, and the Victorian assassin Edward, are all stuck in one body, sharing (and bickering over) control and consciousness.
Mendoza is (unfortunately) stuck in an amnesiac 14-yr-old body for the bulk of the novel. As the strongest character in the series, this creates a void where her forceful passions would have been...

Still, it was fascinating to see Baker bring elements of her epic together here, and lay more clues as to what horrific events may occur in 2355.

I've managed to avoid spoilers so far... on to the last two books, soon! ( )

Three men in a head in a boat. Not the boat's head, an actual head of one of the three men. To say nothing of Mendoza. Poor old future playboy-turned-patsy-for-Martian-mass-murder Alec is obliged to live mentally and virtually with two earlier variations of himself, an effort to create a non-immortal enforcer type to do Dr Zeus' dirty work and maybe deal with ll the immortals piling up around the Silence in the future, from which no signal leaks. First order of business is to rescue Mendoza from an abominable prison in the deep past, after which she is physically restored but mentally amnesiac, leaving our beloved botanist a bit blank and pliable and naive, though there is a sense that she is enjoying a brief respite against the onset of recovered memory. meanwhile, Joseph slips into madness as he puts his own father back together and plots revenge against Alec. All the while the unknowable future creeps closer, and plans are laid and preparations for war discreetly seeded through time. ( )