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Title: In the Garden of Iden (The Company) |
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Review of In the Garden of Iden (The Company)
- This is the first novel in what has become one of the most popular series in contemporary SF, now back in print from Tor. In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus. One of these is Mendoza the botanist. She is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden.
But while there, she meets Nicholas Harpole, with whom she falls in love. And that love sounds great bells of change that will echo down the centuries, and through the succeeding novels of The Company.
Product Description
- In 16th-century Spain, everybody expects the Spanish Inquisition, as they have a well-known tendency to cart people off to their dungeons on trumped-up charges. What 5-year-old Mendoza, on the brink of being tortured as a Jew, is totally unprepared for is to be rescued by the Company--the ultimate bureaucracy of the 24th century--and made immortal. In return, all she has to do is travel through time on a series of assignments for the Company and collect endangered botanical specimens. The wisecracking, mildly misanthropic Mendoza wants nothing to do with historical humans, but her first assignment is to travel to England in 1553--uncomfortably close to those damn Inquisitors--with Joseph and Nefer, two other Company operatives. Their intent is to gather herb samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden, a foolish though generous country squire. (Kage Baker knows her Shakespeare: Sir Walter is the descendant of Alexander Iden, loyal subject of Henry IV, who slew the hungry rebel Jack Cade in that very garden in Kent.)
The cyborg trio poses as Doctor Ruy Lopez, his daughter Rosa (the irrepressible Mendoza, now grown), and her duenna, Doña Marguerita; Sir Walter's hospitality and discretion are bought for the promise of restored youth. (There are hilarious moments that call to mind the Coneheads, who claimed to be from France when caught doing anything peculiar.) Sir Walter's secretary, Nicholas Harpole, is immediately suspicious of and hostile towards the strange "Spanish" visitors, which prompts Mendoza to fall in love with him. Nicholas has his own badly kept secret: he's proudly Protestant at a time when Queen Mary and Philip of Spain are on a Catholicizing rampage. Mendoza knows Nicholas is probably doomed, and that as a Company operative she cannot meddle with his fate, but love makes people do desperate things. Baker surpasses even Connie Willis in humor and precision of period detail in this fresh, ingenious first novel.--Barrie Trinkle
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Comments for In the Garden of Iden (The Company)
- Posted on 2008-05-16
more sitcom than scifi
The time travel and life extension premise is great, but she doesn't do much with it. The rest of the book is full of sarcastic and irritating characters who really are not likeable that reads like a television sitcom. Once I realized I wasn't going to get a satisfying sci-fi experience and lowered my expectations to rock bottom, it was readable in a tawdry way. I might try another one though as the second novel is purportedly much better.
Score: 2
- Posted on 2008-03-02
Excellent debut novel
To start, this is the first book of a series. Like any series, you will not get the whole story in the first book. The first chapter introduces you to the world of the series, and Mendoza drops dark hints that the Company is not as altruistic as it seems to be. She does not return to this theme again. Rather, that theme is explored in other books in the series. What this book is about is Mendoza's first, disastrous assignment. It is a character story more than a plot-driven story. At its heart, it is both a love story, and a cautionary tale of fanatical religious devotion, set appropriately against the fanatically devout reign of Bloody Mary. Most of the book is extremely well-written.
The beginning chapters detail the Company and Mendoza's recruitment. She gets rescued from the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition and goes through the immortality process. This part of the book is utterly riveting. She goes on her first assignment and meets her new teammates. Things start to slow down a bit, but it's still very well-written and is full of gorgeous details. Her team arrives at the Garden of Iden, where her job is to catalogue all of the plants there, because in the future many of these plants will be extinct. She also meets The Guy.
And things come to a screeching halt. This is where I knocked my review down a star, because for the next hundred to two hundred pages, there is a lot of crawling around among the plants, and a lot of witty exchanges and lovey-dovey scenes between Mendoza and The Guy, and the occasional dropped hint that all of this will end in sorrow, but most of the bigger, interesting incidents that happen in this section seem to be filler, with very few serving to advance the plot. Baker's problem is that she sets up Mendoza as needing to study the plants for a full year in order for future scientists to accurately recreate them. That is a very long time frame to have to fill, and only rarely does Baker say anything like, "What with one thing and another, time passed."
Towards the end, things pick up again. The ending left me with a lot of questions about the Company that I wanted answered. Hopefully, Baker will answer them in further books in the series.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2008-01-03
Disappointing!
I picked up this book because of some recommendations from friends on Shelfari. I was greatly disappointed!
This book starts out so well, describing the Company, time travel and immortality and then goes to Spain in the 1500's where a little girl (Mendoza) is rescued from the Inquisition and put in a "special program" with other children. They are trained and receive a number of surgeries that transform them into Cyborgs. The book then goes downhill from there as Mendoza is sent on her task to work in 1500's England during the end of Queen "Bloody" Mary's reign. From there it is painfully dull and very difficult to finish.
What also made this book difficult was that the vast infrastructure that was set up underground in the 1500's is very unbelievable. This book is definately not on my recommended list!
Score: 3
- Posted on 2007-11-08
Interesting premise ruined in a bad book
This review contains slight spoilers.
Wow a book that actually summarizes itself (pg. 239):
"How could millennia-old superbeings be so boring?" Indeed!
Baker's premise was interesting: an organization of immortals travels back in time to preserve things that they deem preserve-worthy. This includes mortals who they convert into immortal cyborgs to serve as their operatives.
If only she had developed this premise in the book, but no, it turns into a silly historical romance between Mendoza - a supposedly highly trained operative - and a stiff (pun intended) mortal, Nicholas, who sees God in every orgasm. Foul ! - a romance novel masquerading as a Science Fiction work!
It seems that Baker forgot about the science fiction somewhere after the first 5 chapters or so to bore us with an improbable historical romance set in the counter-reformation of 16th century England. The book ends with Mendoza being reassigned to the crumbling Aztec world - oh boy, Baker can perpetuate this by transporting the historical romance to a new location. Please spare me!
From the point where you discover the dumb title pun - most of the book is set at the estate of Walter Iden, with its magnificent gardens - this dull, grind of a book becomes very, very bad. The characters are shallow, never developed enough for the reader to discover, or very much care about, their motivations. The mysterious Company that, more or less it turns out, controls the immortals is never developed at all. We are given no clues about its motivation or purpose, much to the detriment of the story. Another reviewer used the term "dimensionless", which is apt in so many ways.
I found little to like about this book, other than the premise. The characters are thinly drawn, predictable, and one dimensional, creating no emotional attachment for the reader. The flow of the book is inconsistent, it d-r-a-g-s for 200 pages while Mendoza and Nicholas do it in every alcove of the estate and we endure an - admittedly well researched - history of religious conflict in Reformation England, then zips to a denouement where the plot turns too abruptly, the mortals meet their various ends and the operatives move on. Yes, it's as interesting as it sounds. Yawn.... I was surprised to learn that the author is an authority on Elizabethan English as I thought that the dialect was faulty: too many 20th centuryisms seemed to work their way into the dialog.
Alas this book seems to suffer from a malady that afflicts Science Fiction writers today: it was written with sequels in mind, rather than developed into a coherent work of fiction. Can no one in this genre write an engrossing work that is self-contained?
This is a silly, poorly-written romance that wastes an interesting premise. Avoid it; there are better things to read (and so little time)!
Score: 1
- Posted on 2007-05-09
Poignant beginning of a beautiful series
In this first novel of the Company series by Kage Baker, we see the inception of young Mendoza, a poor spanish children saved from the maws of Spanish Inquisition, as a temporal cyborg in the Company of Dr Zeus. Inc. We follow her in her first mission with Joseph, her inceptor, and young Latif, in England, under the sway of Her Catholic Majesty Bloody Mary Tudor. They are to visit the Garden of curiosities of Sir walter Iden to retrieve some soon to be extinct botanical and zoological specimens. At sir walter Iden's Mendoza finds her first hopeless love, a stern, roguish protestant called Nicholas Harpole. We see history unfold as the doomed love story between Mendoza and Nicholas reached its most bitter end. As dramatic as it is, this novel is historically sound, with many notations of wry humour. A great first!
Score: 5