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jaceyBooklog 10) Read:10/4/2010
Kage Baker: In the Garden of Iden - The Company # 1
To my shame I hadn't heard of Kage Baker until reading her obituary and now having read her work I can agree with her fans. She died way too young.
This is her first novel and also the first of her 'Company' novels. The Company – in Earth's far future' has cracked the secret of time travel and immortality-by-conversion-to-cyborg. It kidnaps potential agents out of time (as children) at the point (or just before) they are due to die. The humans are the immortalised (medically/surgically) and sent into the world – into their own time or close to it – to preserve precious artifacts long since thought lost. With the benefit of hindsight as to which hiding places will be safe for thousands of years, precious hoards are 'found' by the company's treasure hunters in the future, having been carefully hidden by agents in the past.
The protagonist, Mendoza, is saved as a child from the Spanish Inquisition, educated as a botanist and sent back on a mission to preserve important species of plants from the garden of Sir Walter Iden, English gentleman in the reign of Mary Tudor, Bloody Mary whose religious imperative is to restore the Catholic faith to England even if it means burning all the Protestants at the stake.
Mendoza's doing fine until she falls in love with Nicholas Harpole, a troubled and troublesome unrepentant Protestant simmering with enough religious zeal to light the fires under his own pyre.
Kage Baker: In the Garden of Iden - The Company # 1
To my shame I hadn't heard of Kage Baker until reading her obituary and now having read her work I can agree with her fans. She died way too young.
This is her first novel and also the first of her 'Company' novels. The Company – in Earth's far future' has cracked the secret of time travel and immortality-by-conversion-to-cyborg. It kidnaps potential agents out of time (as children) at the point (or just before) they are due to die. The humans are the immortalised (medically/surgically) and sent into the world – into their own time or close to it – to preserve precious artifacts long since thought lost. With the benefit of hindsight as to which hiding places will be safe for thousands of years, precious hoards are 'found' by the company's treasure hunters in the future, having been carefully hidden by agents in the past.
The protagonist, Mendoza, is saved as a child from the Spanish Inquisition, educated as a botanist and sent back on a mission to preserve important species of plants from the garden of Sir Walter Iden, English gentleman in the reign of Mary Tudor, Bloody Mary whose religious imperative is to restore the Catholic faith to England even if it means burning all the Protestants at the stake.
Mendoza's doing fine until she falls in love with Nicholas Harpole, a troubled and troublesome unrepentant Protestant simmering with enough religious zeal to light the fires under his own pyre.
