In the Garden of Iden
Kage Baker
294 pages
published in 1997

This is a somewhat frustrating novel. In the Garden of Iden is well-polished, especially for a first novel, and built around an interesting backstory, but unfortunately the plot itself was uninteresting. Or at least, I found it uninteresting; your milage may vary. I add that I had no problems with the craft with which Baker told the story, but with the story she choose to tell.

What Kage Baker did in In the Garden of Iden was taking two well known science fiction cliches, timetravel and immortality and doing something new with them. Sometime in the 23rd century, the Zeus company invented both, but unfortunately immortality could only be bestowed on small children and timetravel was expensive and a bore. You couldn't even change history, or at least not recorded history.

Despite these handicaps, the Zeus Company found a way to profit from both inventions. They realised that there was quite a bit of money to be made by mucking about in unrecorded history by e.g. rescuing all those ancient artworks just before they were supposed to be consumed by fire, then hide them in a suitable location and wait for somebody in the present to find that famous painting in his grandfather's inheritage, or something. With these and similar dodges, they quickly discovered the Zeus company actually had quite a bit of money.

And now they could do something even more interesting: they could revive extinct species of plants and animals. So suddenly passenger pigeons were spotted in Iceland, blue whales off the coast of Chile and Santa Lucia fir trees in some remote corner of the Republic of California...

But an operation this big needed a lot of people; schlepping them around time is expensive and hard on the timetravellers. So what they did was go back to the dawn of time, recruit some suitable Neanderthal (and later Homo Sapiens) children, make them immortal Zeus corp. agents and let them handle things. Once things were started up, these immortal cyborg agents recruited more people and made sure all the company's plans came to fruiton. They stayed loyal because these agents thought nothing else was important but their Work of saving important artworks, not to mention uncounted thousands of animal and plant species from extinction...

All of which is explained in the first chapter. In the second chapter, the real story starts and we meet our hero, Mendoza, who as a young girl was taken from the Inquisition in 16th century Spain and turned into a cyborg for Dr Zeus. In the Garden of Iden is the story of her first assignment, going undercover to England in 1554 as part of Philip II's entourage when he comes to marry Queen Mary. Mendoza will go to the country estate of one Sir Walter Iden, who has several botanic curiosities that are extinct by the time of the Company. Her job is to rescue those.

Not a very interesting assignment, or plot for that matter, and things get worse. At Sir Walter Iden's estate, Mendoza falls in love with his secretary Nicholas Harpole, a very intense and fanatical Protestant at a time when England was still resolutely Catholic...

Reading all this, I could not help but think Baker had squandered all the potential promised by that wonderful first chapter for a very pedestrian plot drained of any of the wonder promised by the novel's premise. It doesn't help that Mendoza herself, through whose eyes we see events unfold, is not the most likeable of protagonists and somewhat of a dweeb.

It's also somewhat of an American view of England. There's nothing obviously wrong with Baker's research or writing on this point, but I can't help but shake the feeling of quaintness her writing engenders in some places.

My last point of criticism is a relatively minor one. At one point there's a situation where it looks like the time travellers may be uncovered, only for it to be defused in the most phony way in the very next sentence! I hate this sort of false cliffhangers, where it turns ut a hero was never in any danger int he first place!

Does all this mean you should skip this book? I don't know. As I said at the start, In the Garden of Iden is a very accomplished novel despite its flaws and Kage Baker, on the strength of it, is a promising writer. This is not an essential book, but certainly one to keep an eye out for.