In the Garden of Iden (The Company, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Jun 11, 2011 mark monday rated it liked it

Shelves: into-the-past, scifi-modern, romantica, x-the-company

hello there, little romance. i see you! you are trying to hide, aren't you? well you picked some good camouflage, i must say. you've concealed yourself within a fairly operatic setting: the tale of an immortal teenage cyborg employed by a secretive and futuristic Company, sent on missions in our far-flung past to save extinct plants, waiting for the day that your future finally catches up with your employer's apparently golden present. it is quite a setting, i almost didn't see you there! you ar ...more

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Jul 27, 2007 Wealhtheow rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical, sci-fi

A really incredible book, possibly the best book in the Company series. Mendoza is saved from the dungeons of the Inquisition to become an immortal cyborg working for Dr.Zeus, a company that has harnassed both immortality and timetravel. For her first trip to "the field", she travels to Tudor England to rescue rare plants from extinction. Unfortunately for her, she falls utterly in love with a remarkable mortal man--who is devoutly Protestant when Queen Mary takes the throne. Mendoza observes th ...more

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Sep 27, 2008 Ubik rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Started out great, but fell flat in the middle. I was really hoping for more exploration into the time travel element and the "scavenger-hunting" that I was originally interested in reading for in the first place. It just turns into a doomed love story from about a third of the way through and never does anything else. Every other aspect takes a back seat to the romance. ...more

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Apr 01, 2009 Sarah rated it really liked it

Shelves: time-travel, speculative-fiction

My mother has been telling me to read this book for years, and of course she was right. It's a good concept, made better by the character the author chose to tell the story. A nice balance of time-travel SF and historical fiction, vividly described. ...more

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Jan 02, 2013 Daniel Roy rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: wwe-wogf, sf

Cyborg immortals! Time travel! A ruthless corporation that acquires goods lost to time in order to turn a profit! What exciting concepts to squander away on a boring Elizabethan love story. It's like your five year-old daughter breaking into your collection of Terminator action figures and sitting them down for tea and biscuits with Barbie.

The novel was off to a great start, with a Spanish girl being saved in extremis from the Spanish Inquisition, bent on torturing her for allegedly being a secr ...more

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Aug 01, 2012 Kara Babcock rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, from-library, time-travel, 2012-read, historical-fiction

Time travel poses a host of complications, no matter which set of rules one follows. Plus, I mean, as cool as it might be to pop back to ancient Egypt or Rome or Tudor England for afternoon tea, I wouldn’t want to live there. Hello, indoor plumbing much? Flush toilets and high speed Internet? I like my “modern” conveniences, and I can understand why the first employees of the Company didn’t enjoy their duties much. And the Company happened to have a formula for immortality lying around. So, you Time travel poses a host of complications, no matter which set of rules one follows. Plus, I mean, as cool as it might be to pop back to ancient Egypt or Rome or Tudor England for afternoon tea, I wouldn’t want to live there. Hello, indoor plumbing much? Flush toilets and high speed Internet? I like my “modern” conveniences, and I can understand why the first employees of the Company didn’t enjoy their duties much. And the Company happened to have a formula for immortality lying around. So, you know, it makes total sense to train contemporary people, make them immortal, and have them do your bidding. Collect genetic samples from extinct plants, rescue lost works of art … the sky is the limit.

Kage Baker has some pretty interesting rules going on in In the Garden of Iden, and she lays them out explicitly at the beginning of the book. So I’m not going to bore you with the details. Mendoza is a little girl languishing in the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition until she gets rescued and recruited by the Company. They make her immortal (yay, cyborgs!) and train her in history—past and future. She specializes in botany, which, for the Company, means she will spend most of her time identifying extinct plants and taking samples so they can be resurrected in the future.

Mendoza is rescued when she is about three or four, so she essentially grows up as a ward of the Company—and as an immortal cyborg (yes, there are immortal cyborg teenagers). This has the interesting result of estranging her from ordinary—such as it is in the sixteenth century—human society. She isn’t fond of ordinary humans and specializes in the New World, hoping for an isolated posting somewhere devoid of dense contemporary populations. Instead she gets assigned to a Spanish delegation to England, where she will study the exoticon plants in the garden of Sir Walter Iden. Much to her surprise, she falls in love with a contemporary Protestant at a time when Catholicism was just beginning to come back into vogue in England in a big—Bloody—way.

Mendoza makes for a great protagonist. Her prejudice against her fellow contemporary humans speaks volumes about how the Company operates. It’s kind of like a vast pyramid scheme—throughout the ages they’ve offered these people from the past the chance to transcend history and inherit a promised land in the future, provided they do the Company’s bidding. I’ve only read one novel, but I hope Baker explores this theme more and the ramifications of what happens when all these employees catch up to the Company in “the present”. I can’t help but feel there is going to be … friction. For instance, Mendoza’s counselor is apparently from a Paleolithic tribe—so he’s been on the job for quite some time. Isn’t there going to be a huge seniority issue in the future? Or is there something more sinister happening?

But I digress. Mendoza: she’s smart and opinionated without being too sarcastic for her own good. She is good at what she does but often oversteps or overreacts—quick-tempered is perhaps apt. Again, this is why she’s a good protagonist. She keeps things moving, keeps us in the action, but at the same time she can be meditative when necessary. Baker goes for an intimate portrayal of a (Catholic) English household during the brief Counter-Reformation. The friction between Nicolas and the rest of the household underscores Mendoza’s observations regarding how this conflict over religions and politics is brutal and barbaric, rendering them poignant when they might have been trite or overdone.

I’m not nearly as impressed by the supporting characters. Joseph is an interesting father figure for Mendoza, but ultimately he and Nef are really just foils for her without much in the way of character development for themselves. This is a little disappointing. Likewise, Sir Walter is more plot device than anything. Nicolas is fascinating in that he reminds me why I would hate to be alive during the sixteenth century, but that’s about it.

In the Garden of Iden reminds me of so many other period dramas. It spends a lot of time showing off its setting and focusing on the zeitgeist of the period at the expense of the plot. It’s a testament to Baker’s writing ability, then, that she can distract me long enough not to care about these things. I enjoyed Mendoza’s experience in England, watching her change from feeling superior to humans to sleeping with and loving a stupid human. And this is more of a historical novel than a science-fiction or time-travel story, despite what the trappings might otherwise imply. Baker has essentially swapped time-travel in for prophecy, for its most important contribution to the plot is Mendoza’s awareness of what the future holds—namely, a Protestant queen who becomes one of the most influential people in history. Hence, the science-fictional element of the book is the source of dramatic irony that transforms Mendoza’s romance with Nicolas into a classical tragedy.

This book didn’t quite blow me away like I was hoping it would after what I had read about it. But I’m glad I finally got around to reading it, and I’m looking forward to reading more of the series. Baker has done something different from the traditional “smash-and-grab” idea of time-travel artifact retrieval, and I’m interested to see where she takes it. Combined with a smart protagonist who has her share of flaws and failings, and you have a successful novel and the start of something good.

...more

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Apr 14, 2011 Caitie (caitiegirlreads) rated it liked it

What it lacked in polish, it made up in fun and creative ideas.

I liked the first chapter where Kage explained the rules of time travel within the world she created, a very interesting, and as far as my experience goes one of the more original ideas I have seen/read.

History can be changed, so long as it's not recorded history. You can travel back in time, and then back to the point from which you came, but never forward. Hence the need for the immortals... or the more appropriate title 'cyborgs'. ...more

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Sep 28, 2011 Tamara added it

Shelves: europe, sf, britain, time-travel, female-protagonist, author-female, romance, immortality, renaissance, religeon

Well written, with an interesting concept and characters, but I felt like the book just rushed through it and never managed to give the events any of the gravitas they required to pull off the more philosophical points. The most intriguing part was The Company, with its rather subversive, to my experience at least, take on immortality and secret histories, but that remained firmly background, unfortunately.

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May 27, 2011 Nicky rated it liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction, romance, historical-fiction-alternatehistory

In the Garden of Iden is more of a romance hidden inside a historical fiction in a spec-fic coating. I'm sure people keep telling me that the rest of the series is different; there's nothing particularly wrong with this, but it wasn't really what I'd hoped for.

Really, I'd hoped for some overarching plot that would really tie it all together, love story and all, but that didn't really happen to my satisfaction, with the result that it felt like set up for all the wonderful things Mendoza (the ma ...more

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Jun 13, 2008 This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For rated it it was ok

Shelves: ebooks, science-fiction, fiction, time-travel

I thought this book started off with a bang, a fabulous concept with a ton of possibility (granted the beginning was completely expository, but in a good way). The remainder of the book just fizzled. The concept was wasted, the story rather flat, the characters largely uninteresting. Perhaps my disappointment comes from the fact that I was so pumped after the beginning that the rest was a major letdown (I came into the book with no particular expectations at all). It just feels like there was ro ...more

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May 10, 2011 Michelle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, historical-fiction, ebook, women-in-genre-challenge, time-travel

the very promising start to a series about mendoza, a junior botanist for the company. a brief plot synopsis (immortal cyborg marching through time for fun and profit) makes this sound like all kinds of sci-fi tropes, but in Kage Baker's skilled hands, this is anything but common. full of hilarity and romance while still being about immortal cyborgs, it's a whole lot of fun. ...more

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Sep 06, 2010 Julie S. rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi-dystopian-fantasy, read-in-2011

The concept was exciting, but the execution left me wanting more. After the initial set-up, it felt like a silly romance from the middle ages. That might have been my fault with my expectations. I was expecting an action-y adventure with more science fiction elements.

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Apr 07, 2012 Suz rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobook, non-men-sff-authors, science-fiction

A little bit of romance, a little bit of time travel, a little bit of historical fiction. It's a very gentle sci-fi-esque book wrapped in a good story with wonderful characterizations and language.

I enjoyed it immensely and plan to continue in the series. ...more

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Jul 12, 2008 Terence rated it really liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction

The first 3 or 4 Company novels are the strongest of the series. When Baker's focus drifts off of Mendoza, they lose a certain "energy."

The short story collections are also very strong entries in the series. ...more

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