The Life of the World to Come - Kage Baker
February, 12, 2004
Love this series, hate the covers. That's really rather unappealing, don't you think?
***
January 26, 2015
More than a decade later and I love this even more. The covers are still embarrassing as hell with art derived from some other story and weird giant heads floating above it all.
Okay, so now Mendoza is being punished by The Company who've sent her Way Back (150k years back) on Catalina Island. Well, the weather is good, and she's got time to work on her maize. Then one day a ship crashes into her corn and it just happens to be yet another incarnation of her true love. This time it's Alec Checkerfield from the 24th century. He's a pirate. Adventures ensue.
Two things about this book: one, Baker seems to throw her hands up in the air, and starts to really revel in the silliness inherent in situation. If you can have anything then of course you can have an AI pirate captain, and why wouldn't you? But two is that even as she really embraces the fun of her fantasy, she also gets rather more serious about the problems of her future, and starts trying to fix it. Imagining a dystopia extrapolated from things that irk one in the present is easy. Coming up with plausible solutions is hard.
I think it's been overused in reviews, and I tend to avoid it, but I'm just going to put this out there: the series becomes truly rollicking at this point.
Library copy
