It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

If Charles Dickens hadn’t laid claim to the line a century and a half earlier, Kage Baker could have used it to pithily sum up this jewel of a novel.

(The only spoilers in here are for the first five pages of the book, even if it doesn’t look that way. Honest.)

Imagine a future in which two inventions revolutionize the world: Time travel and immortality. Actually, you invent the immortality first, and then you invent the time travel in order to test it. But, in any case, both of them come with catches: First, the process for creating an immortal is horrendously expensive, can only be performed on young children, and requires surgery so horrendous that few parents would subject their children to it. Time travel, on the other hand, is an incredibly expensive, one-way street: You can send people into the past, and bring them back to their point of origin, but you can’t send them into the future. Plus, most people find traveling into the past uncomfortable: It’s dirty. It’s violent. It’s unpleasant. It’s full of strange people.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re the Zeus Company you find a simple solution: You go back into the past to the dawn of interesting human history, pick up some orphaned natives, turn them into immortals, give them a top-notch education and massive historical databases, and then come home. Now you don’t have to keep shuttling back and forth your operatives: You just let those immortal natives you’ve recruited travel through time the old-fashioned way – by living it. Along the way they’ll be saving priceless works of art from destruction, preserving endangered species, and recruiting more agents to the cause.

Cool concept? I thought so.

Having rapidly crafted a cunning universe, Kage Baker begins crafting a cunning tale. On the surface, it is a simplistic (perhaps even obvious) tale: A young, orphaned girl is rescued from 16th century Spain by the Company, turned into an immortal operative, and then sent on her first mission to Queen Mary’s England.

Viewed from that simplistic angle, The Garden of Iden is an unremarkable – even boring – novel. But, in truth, the story of this novel is not a nifty time travel mission. The story of this novel is the story of its title character: It’s an emotional, gut-wrenching tale, and the most surprising thing about it is the subtlety with which its emotional punch it delivered.

As you read The Garden of Iden you are lulled into a seeming complacence: Pieces seem to fall into place just the way you would expect, the cast of characters seems to do just what you would expect, and so forth. Through this complacency you are kept heartily – if lightly – entertained through Baker’s irreverent wit, startling reality and depth of characterization, and beautifully accurate descriptions of setting and history.

But then, suddenly, you realize that this complacency is all an illusion. While you’ve been enjoying a light tale of romance and mild adventure, Baker has been gently gathering up the rug you’re standing then: Suddenly she’s yanking the rug out from under you and throwing an emotional fist right into your gut.

And as you stumble back from the impact, you realize that you’ve actually been reading brilliance at work. Because the surprise doesn’t come out of left field: Baker has been building it up from the very first page, and you didn’t see it coming at all.

GRADE: A

THE GARDEN OF IDEN
Kage Baker
Published: 1998
Publisher: Avon Eos
Cover Price: $5.99
ISBN: 0380731797
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I’ve been meaning to give Lawrence Watt-Evans a try for a long time. Last week the stars finally conjoined in such a way that I found myself with a copy of Nightside City clenched between my fists.

One sleepless night later the novel had been devoured and I had come to one simple conclusion:

Nightside City is an unsung masterpiece.

This book stands somewhere between Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and deserves to be as well-known as both. Lawrence Watt-Evans crafts a riveting tale which is one-half cyberpunk and one-half detective noir, with strong dashes of hard SF sensibility, insightful characterization, and tight plotting thrown in to spice the mix.

The world in which the novel takes place is not only immediately memorable for its unique conception (a city in a crater on the dark side of a planet, slowly revolving into the devastatingly deadly rays of the sun), but also deeply immersive as a result of the loving detail Watt-Evans flawlessly weaves throughout the story.

The plot is a tight, fast-paced mystery told with all the style and aplomb of a Chandler – although I’d recommend skipping the back cover text on this one (my edition calmly summarizes the first half of the plot and removes most of the mystery).

In case I haven’t made myself clear, this one comes highly recommended.

GRADE: A

NIGHTSIDE CITY
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Published: 1989
Publisher: Foxacre Press
Cover Price: $13.50
ISBN: 0970971117
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As promised on Saturday, we’ve got our first substantive update of real, honest-to-god content in the form of five What I’m Reading reviews:

1. Nightside City – Lawrence Watt-Evans
2. Garden of Iden – Kage Baker
3. Gods in Darkness – Karl Edward Wagner
4. The Ruby Dynasty – Catherine Asaro
5. The Stars My Destination/Demolished Man – Alfred Bester

These can also be accessed through the Reviews page, of course.

The Bibliography is no longer under construction. That tingling you’re feeling is almost certainly not excitement. You probably want to check to make sure your power cords are properly grounded.

This is not, in fact, the substantive update mentioned yesterday. That’s still to come.

The site’s been quiet for a few days because I’ve been down in Decatur, Illinois visiting with my family down there: My great-aunt and great-uncle and a clan of second cousins. They’re like immediate family to me and I love them dearly. We had a wonderful time, although I discovered that my bowling skills have sadly rusted over from disuse.

While I was there, the subject of heritage and lineage and genealogy came up. This led my great-aunt Jean to relate the following story of my great-grandfather (on my father’s mother’s side):

When America first joined the Great War in Europe – what we would later come to call World War I – my great-grandfather was just barely too old to be caught by the draft. But, as the war dragged on, the nation’s need for brave young men grew. So, inevitably, the draft age was raised and raised and raised again.

But somehow my great-grandfather always stayed just a little ahead of it. Or, rather, he stayed ahead of it for awhile, because his lead was shrinking: At first he was a few years beyond the maximum. Then only a year. Then a few months. A few days. And, in the end, the draft caught up with him.

So my great-grandfather boarded a train and left the Midwest, bound for New York City. And when he reached New York City he was put onto a ship, and the ship was sent out into the Atlantic. Soon he would be in the trenches in France, and then God alone knew what might happen to him.

But when that ship was halfway ‘cross the ocean, the Germans surrendered. Just like that the Great War was over. So that ship turned right back around and came back to New York Harbor. They got back just in time for the ticker-tape parades, and in one of those ironic twists of fate that you couldn’t put into a novel (because no one would believe it) they – and others like them – made up the majority of those who were feted as returning heroes.

Forever after, whenever he was asked about the Armistice which ended World War I, my great-grandfather would say: “Well, when the Kaiser heard I was comin’…”

…

Tomorrow, or possibly the next day, we’ll have a more substantive update (at last!).