In the Garden of Iden

Title: In the Garden of Iden
Author: Kage Baker
Published: 1997 by Avon Books
Genre: Historical science fiction!
Pages: 294


My better half's been telling me to READ THIS SERIES!!! for a long while now, and I finally obeyed! In the Garden of Iden's the first book of Kage Baker's Company-series. Let's see if I can explain it a little.

Okay, so, a few centuries in the future, there's this organisation, the Company, who aim to preserve extinct species and plants, protect works of art and so on. They do this by traveling in time, to the past, taking orphans and making them immortal. These kids are brought up to work for the Company; for example Iden's main character, botanist Mendoza, on her first assignment rescues valuable plants from extinction from Sir Walter Iden's famous garden in Elizabethan England. She and a few other operatives stay as Sir Walter's guests, and young Mendoza is immediately smitten with the Sir's gloom cookie of a secretary, Nicholas Harpole.

So, it's kind of a historical romance -Baker being an expert in Elizabethan England- with lots of science fiction elements. And a fake unicorn. And nice amounts of humour.

According to the SO, the series gets better along the way, the first few books taking it slow. But I really liked this one, too, with all its introductoriness, so the series is looking to be pretty darn good. Like with the Song of Ice and Fire, I'm going to try to take this slowly. Read a book now, another in a while. Make it last. Like with the Song of Ice and Fire, I'm most likely going to fail fantabulously in this endeavour and finish the series before summer.


We crossed a lot of water and flew over a dry red land, remote and silent. We touched down within the high walls of Terra Australis Training Compound 32-1800. It had been there about fifteen hundred years when I was enrolled, and had had time to install all the little amenities: air conditioning, laser defense, a piano in the gymnasium. Within its towering walls were gardens and playgrounds and the domes of cool subterranean classrooms. And hospitals. And warehouses. In fact, most of the place was underground.
It wasn't all that different from any particularly demanding boarding school, except that of course nobody ever went home for the holidays and we had a lot of brain surgery.