A thank-you

In the Garden of Iden is one of the best first novels of a series I’ve ever read. In Kage Baker’s universe, scientists from a shady organization known only as The Company have developed not only a way to travel through time, but have developed the resources to transform small children into cyborgs, and to augment their brains and bodies and train them to work quietly on the sidelines of humanity. Baker’s cyborgs are largely gentle librarians of an immortal sort, cataloguing and preserving the creations and resources that short-lived humans squander.

In the Garden of Iden follows the adventures of Mendoza, saved from the Spanish Inquisition as a child, turned into a Company cyborg, and sent as an adult to catalogue the garden of an English country squire in the year 1553. Mendoza finds herself falling in love with an outspoken Protestant during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary. The turmoil that follows is tense, gripping, and a fantastic read that’s rich in period detail and humor.

I was equally enchanted by the two sequels that followed. In Sky Coyote, Mendoza and her mentor, Joseph, attempt to convince a pre-Columbian tribe that they are gods come to save the tribe from Europeans that soon will raze the land completely. And in the superb Mendoza in Hollywood, Mendoza finds herself in mid-nineteenth-century California, confronted by a familiar face seemingly resurrected to torture her.

What keeps the entire ten-volume series moving is its inexorable march to a doomed future, to a specific date in the twenty-fourth century after which no more Company communications are transmitted to the past. The immortal cyborgs fear—with good reason—that the date is their last on earth, and a small handful decide to resist whatever dire fate the Company has in mind. I wish I could say that the rest of the series is as fantastic as the first three books, but I honestly can’t. Once Baker moves past the current day, for me the novels lose their groundedness; when an author’s outstanding strength is weaving in historical detail, it’s a pity when they move out of the bounds of history. The final volume is so convoluted and dependent upon a fleet of secondary characters that I more or less gave up on making sense of it all. I enjoyed it. I simply didn’t understand every nuance, after nine previous volumes and eleven years.

However, I will say this: even past the first three books, rarely has a long series been so readable, or consistently funny, or have some of the characters been so dear to me.

It was with a little shock that I read a couple of weeks ago that Baker was gravely ill from uterine cancer, and with even more dismay that I read she’d passed away, Sunday. To those who never read her novels and short stories of the Company, I’d strongly urge you to indulge.