Plot Introduction
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.
Read more about this topic: The Graveyard Game
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)