The Life Of The World To Come--Kage Baker

It's so nice to find a book that reinvigorated a series and reminds you of why you were reading it in the first place. Kage Baker is a science fiction writer whose series about The Company and the people who work for it is one of the best combinations of satirical humor and thrill I've found. The Company's greatest achievement and revenue driver is that they've perfected immortality and time travel, along with genetic splicing and a few other assorted technologies. Unfortunately, the procedure only works on children. And you cannot change recorded history. Ah, but if you take children, (and so many children have just died or gone missing throughout history) and modify them into cyborgs and send them to gather items that would just be destroyed or lost, put it all in storage and either sell or develop future drugs or technologies off them--why, then you'd rule the world!

Which good ol' Dr. Zeus Corporation does. Up until 2355, anyway. No one knows what happens after that point. All recorded history stops.

Baker's first four books in this series were great--they centered on Mendoza, a cyborg and botanist whose first mission goes awry when she falls in love with a 16th century human who is burned at the stake. So when she encounters him again in the early 19th century, who can blame her freakout? When last we heard of her, she had been sent to solitary confinement in the BCE for a few thousand years.

Baker has great characters and a fabulous grasp on history, but in the middle of this series the books just started spinning like truck tires in the mud. Not enough happened to propel the story or my interest.

But Baker's back on track and clearing up details with this book, which charts the life of Alec Checkerfield, Seventh Earl of Finsbury, and a man not quite of his time and class. We've met Alec before--he's appeared in some of the short stories. He's not quite human. And a pirate. And he's got a connection to Mendoza.

The story is good, Baker really lets loose on her depiction of a nanny-state future, and finally I can finish the series and enjoy it!