Sky Coyote by Kage Baker

It's an interesting basic premise: time travel (with some of the usual limitations) has been discovered and operatives are sent to rescue priceless and irreplaceable artifacts from the past - sort of like Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. Eventually, these rescued artifacts come to include culture and tradition. The operatives themselves are cyborgs created from rescued ("recruited") children. The main character was the child of a French cave painter and should have been slaughtered with the rest of his family when some other tribal barbarians overran their home. These cyborgs are essentially immortal and proceed through the centuries toward the point in the future when the whole program began.

The main part of the story has to do with the "rescue" of an entire village of sixteenth century Northern California natives by persuading them to voluntarily decamp with the immortals and mortals of the future to one of their hidden sites - where apparently they become the servant class; after all, since they aren't made immortal, the servants eventually die and since the immortals don't want their servants distracted by a bunch of rug rats -- well, you get the picture. The vehicle of persuasion is our hero, transformed into their god, Sky Coyote, who talks and acts a lot like a second-rate stand-up comedian - bada boom.

I'm afraid the whole thing seemed somewhat diffuse and pointless to me. The "ancient cultures" are clear parodies of present day society, funny enough, but tiresome after a while. Nothing of significance is resolved. The characters and story lines are unsubtle and, having slapped the reader in the face with some snarky commentary on our society, they just sort of flounder away into nothing much. Many potentially interesting directions are sacrificed on the altar of a cheap laugh.

It kept me reading - it was entertaining - but I kept hoping that something would happen. There were hints at this, that, or the other - but all the firecrackers just fizzled out. I fear that the intent was some sort of subtle high-level critique of 21st century America, but it was certainly not subtle and not particularly insightful either. Sorry if it is intended to be the first of a series with good old facilitator Joseph moving from episode to episode exposing our own failings and fallacies, because, if so, he will be moving on without me.