Book Rec: In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker
(I couldn't sleep. I had to finish this book.)
In the future, a Company called Dr. Zeus Incorporated discovers the secret of time travel. Then they develop the perfect time travelers, taking young children and replacing all their imperfect mortal parts with better ones, creating immortal cybernetic beings to do the Company's dirty work. What do they do exactly? Well, the Company makes the lives of the future better by preserving the past. Agents are sent out into the past to rescue everything from art to animal life, which can then be "discovered" years later in one of their many safe houses around the world. Life is improved, and the Company makes a killing in profits. Everyone wins!
At nineteen, Mendoza as never been out in the field before. But while trying to focus on her mission (to collect samples of a rare species of holly found in Sir Walter Iden's garden) with the horrors of the English Counter-Reformation creeping closer day by day, no amount of training can help her avoid the inevitable heartbreak caused by falling in love with a mortal.
(I knew what was going to happen from the moment I opened this book. I knew, for 300 pages how this book would end. And yet, when it came to the end, I still cried for the last 40 pages. I didn't want to get to what was coming, but I couldn't help but continue on, voraciously, until the very end. Well done, Ms. Baker, well done.)
In the future, a Company called Dr. Zeus Incorporated discovers the secret of time travel. Then they develop the perfect time travelers, taking young children and replacing all their imperfect mortal parts with better ones, creating immortal cybernetic beings to do the Company's dirty work. What do they do exactly? Well, the Company makes the lives of the future better by preserving the past. Agents are sent out into the past to rescue everything from art to animal life, which can then be "discovered" years later in one of their many safe houses around the world. Life is improved, and the Company makes a killing in profits. Everyone wins!
At nineteen, Mendoza as never been out in the field before. But while trying to focus on her mission (to collect samples of a rare species of holly found in Sir Walter Iden's garden) with the horrors of the English Counter-Reformation creeping closer day by day, no amount of training can help her avoid the inevitable heartbreak caused by falling in love with a mortal.
(I knew what was going to happen from the moment I opened this book. I knew, for 300 pages how this book would end. And yet, when it came to the end, I still cried for the last 40 pages. I didn't want to get to what was coming, but I couldn't help but continue on, voraciously, until the very end. Well done, Ms. Baker, well done.)