italics

The Company series
by Kage Baker

reviewed by

JEN TALLEY EXUM

I read my first Kage Baker novel, In the Garden of Iden, by accident, thinking it was a different sort of book entirely. It turned out to be a lucky accident, as Baker’s Company series has become one of my favorites of all time. Iden does a fair job of pretending to be a historical romance set in 16th century England. But that’s only a very small part of it – there’s the Spanish Inquisition, to begin with, and a five-year-old girl rescued by cyborgs. There’s the time travel. And the immortality. And the nifty science fiction gadgets. As well as passionate romance, impeccable historical detail, and rare plant life. I was hooked.

Fortunately it was only the beginning of Baker’s tales of Zeus, Inc., aka The Company, a 24th century firm dealing in both time travel and immortality with the stated purpose of saving the lost treasures of history. The Company rescues small children from the vagaries of time and turns them into immortal cyborgs, who they then employ to rescue bits of the past for the benefit of the future. Mendoza, the heroine of Iden, is trained as a botanist, and her job is to collect sample of plants which will be extinct in the future. With each book, however, things get more complicated as the cyborgs get restless–-living through millennium after millennium does get boring--the Company becomes ever more mysterious, and the 24th century looms ever closer. Because the Company’s immortal employees are well-versed in history, but no one knows what will happen when they reach 2355, the Company’s present, and when rumors start to fly, operatives start to disappear.

Meanwhile, the cyborgs carry out their assignments and wait. They don’t travel through time, but with it, and in between assignments have century-or-more-long vacations at elaborate Company resorts located in remote, unexplored jungles and deserts. In the second book, Sky Coyote, Joseph-–the 20,000-year-old operative who “recruited” Mendoza–-is assigned to a Chumash Indian village in California, ca. 1700. He’s supposed to preserve the village and people, saving them from the impending arrival of Europeans and transporting them to a Company base, by pretending to be one of their gods. Baker’s witty and insightful portrayal of the Chumash is an absolute delight, and Joseph’s trickster god role begins to clue the reader in as to how the Company really operates and that there are some definite ulterior motives at work. Is the Company more interested in exploiting and getting rich off the past, or in preserving it? (Yeah, take a guess.)

Baker returns to Mendoza in Mendoza in Hollywood, by far my favorite of the series. Mendoza, still recovering from the trauma of her first assignment, is sent to a remote area of California to continue her plant-collecting, and ends up assigned to a stagecoach stop in 1862, what will one day be the Hollywood freeway. Baker here combines heart-pounding action, more unconventional romance, Hollywood history, and a highly entertaining condor who nearly steals the entire book. It’s the unexpected witty details and the black humor that gives the entire series its extra oomph, and Baker is in rare from here.

As the series continues, and time inevitably marches on toward the Silence of 2355, Baker weaves more and more threads into an increasingly complex tapestry of history. The Graveyard Game sees cyborgs Joseph and Lewis attempting to discover what happened to Mendoza in California, and stumbling upon a conspiracy of epic proportions. The more recent novels have focused on other aspects of the Company and its far-reaching influence, while dropping hints about the ultimate fate of the cyborgs we have come to know and (sometimes) love. Readers begin to understand how the Company has influenced history from the very beginning through the eyes of its various operatives. The Children of the Company, the most recent release, includes vignettes based on some of Baker’s numerous Company short stories, most notably the Hugo-nominated novella "Son Observe the Time," a heartbreaking tale of the San Francisco earthquake. Two more projected novels aim to wrap up the series and answer the many questions the preceding tales have posed.

Baker’s prose style is cool and elegant, infused with wit and dark humor that allow the reader to deal with tragedy and triumph alike. Through her social commentary about the 24th century–-where nearly everything fun is illegal, including coffee, chocolate, sugar, and pet ownership–-Baker has a lot to say about our world, but it’s woven so seamlessly into the narrative that it never feels forced or artificial. The cyborgs’ initial horror of the earthy ways of humans provides both humor and food for thought. But most of all these are damn good stories, the kind that make me envious of people who haven’t read them yet because they have no idea the ride that’s in store.

The Company books in order:

Official homepage: http://www.kagebaker.com/.