Oscars: so boring, no surprise, and that fucking horrible smug guy from the Frames won? Nooo

The Sarah Connor Chronicles is one of the few watchable new shows this season (which is more than you could say for the happily buried Bionic Woman revamp) -- but it's watchable and not much else, which makes me reluctant to enter into fandom. There are so many conceptually good ideas going on -- the tension between the changeable future and the inevitability of the development of AI, the hints pointing towards a possible arc about changing John Connor's messiah role from resistance leader to robot/human conciliator, Cameron learning what it means to be a machine intelligence rather than just how to be more human (as with Data and so much bad SF), the neat gender stuff (strength, who's protected, who's protecting, why, and how) that doesn't reduce to simple inversions of traditional roles. The moments of subtle storytelling have been wonderfully executed (we find out about the guidance counselor's involvement in the girl's suicide based on the IDAN on the door and the implication of his questions -- but will this actually come to anything?); I wish I could say the same of the episode-by-episode plotting. It's a shame that, to this point, the actual episodes aren't all that fun to watch -- a kind of constant generic mildly grim tone, lame attempts at humor with Summer Glau pulling her usual deadpan weirdo schtick -- when there's been so much work to get all the details and the subtext just right. There's still time for it to improve, though.

Kage Baker, In The Garden Of Iden

Bad segue, but speaking of robots (well, cyborgs) and time travel, Kage Baker's Company series appears to be complete, and I've heard praise, so I might as well dive in from the beginning.

An abbreviated version of the intriguing initial premise, communicated in the novel's extremely dense opening chapter and questioned/undermined over the course of the story: In the 24th Century, the Company, also known as Dr. Zeus, Inc., developed immortality and time travel; both have considerable limitations. The cyborgifying immortality process is prohibitively expensive, works only on little children (only rare candidates, at that), and has horrible side effects (even beyond making you no longer, strictly speaking, human) -- even parents who could afford it wouldn't want it done to their kids. Time travel can't go into the future, only the past (and back to the time traveler's present), and, no matter what you do, history cannot be changed. The loophole? The rule only applies to recorded history. Which allows the Company's agents to arrange everything outside the purview of recorded history so that everything that ever happens works to Dr. Zeus' eventual advantage. But don't worry -- the Company is benevolent, you see, and has an interest in preserving all sorts of past knowledge, lost works of art, endangered species and such for the benefit of all humanity, making a tidy profit on the side from sales of paintings to collectors and extinct miracle cure components to pharmaceutical companies -- they are a business, after all. To do their philanthropic work throughout the ages, the Company makes use of that otherwise useless immortality technique, sending personnel and equipment into the past, collecting children who'd otherwise be killed and wouldn't be missed, making them immortal, educating them about the whole of human history, and teaching them about Dr. Zeus' noble purpose. Now the Company has an eternal, self-perpetuating, very loyal workforce in all periods of time. Won't they be rewarded when they reach the glorious future they're building!

There are gigantic holes in the self-serving cover story, of course, some of which should be easy to identify just from this summary. For one, how, exactly, is history unchangeable? What would happen if you shot George Washington? Or would events conspire to make sure you couldn't? What are the limits of "recorded history?" Whatever is on file in the 24th Century? Whatever is witnessed? Could you violate history that's recorded but later lost? What about lies in the historical record? How genuine are the Company's motives, and what about their scruples? We learn that the indoctrination process is pretty much brainwashing, and the Company is not above exploiting its operatives' personal traumas. Loyalty shouldn't be taken for granted; the immortals are incredibly smart, and none of them really believe their welcome will be warm when the future finally arrives. And no one knows who's *really* running Dr. Zeus...

The book establishes plenty of mysteries, and I'm sure they'll be explored in later books. What we do learn here is from our narrator, Mendoza, a Company biologist, once a 16th Century Spanish girl facing certain death by the Inquisition. This is the story of her first field mission and her disastrous first love, detailing why she followed her heart before and why she lives for her work now despite seeing right through the Company's party line.

Mendoza's voice is casual, pleasing, anachronistic, sarcastic, bitter. She and the other cyborgs speak to my mind like present day English majors; they've experienced the entirety of modern pop culture (films, especially -- there's a ton of film references, mostly invented), and the language apparently doesn't drift much in the next 300 years. It's not particularly jarring.

Mendoza is pretty severely damaged at this point; she starts out pretty antisocial (you would be, too, if you were in her situation) and ends up completely unwilling to engage with human beings. But, though this is essentially a fairly teenage angsty situation, Baker doesn't wallow in or exploit Mendoza's pain; there's plenty of joy here, even if it's transitory, and Mendoza is not jaded enough to misrepresent her past or treat her previous hopes and aspirations entirely with contempt, however naive they may have been. The novel gets the delicate balance between the inevitable grind of fate and "maybe it could have turned out differently" just right; a little bit depends on chance, a lot depends on choice, and character determines everything that occurs.

Briefly, the plot: Mendoza, her father figure Joseph, and other Company operatives are sent to England during the reign of Bloody Mary. Mendoza's task is to collect rare plant samples from the country estate of Sir Walter Iden; in the process, she falls hard for his secretary, Nicholas Harpole, who is very intelligent and charming and comes to return her affections but holds opinions that are ahead of his time. Some of these opinions are extreme. Some are dangerous. Mendoza has been warned that there are no happy endings in love affairs with mortals, but you know how teenagers sometimes think they're special and unique like that. Some things you just have to learn from experience.

It's a very accomplished first novel, effective both as a self-contained story and as the prelude to a bigger one. I take it that Baker has a background in teaching Elizabethan English, and her knowledge of the period helps to make the setting feel genuine enough to be credible without excessive focus on the portrayal of realistic attitudes. It's not perfectly constructed -- there's some buildup between Nef and Sir Walter that doesn't pay off but also doesn't entirely work if it's meant as contrast to Nicholas and Mendoza's love affair. Also, I feel like if this were Bujold or Rowling, the Iden ancestor's story would be key to the plot, rather than simply a background detail that partially serves to motivate Sir Walter's later actions, and that would be a very different novel but one I'd be interested in reading. But the constant character-driven plot propulsion is a very promising sign, and the flaws are minor. Here's hoping Baker fulfills her potential and improves over the course of the series -- if so, she might join the likes of Banks, Brust, and Bujold as go-to recommendations with both casual appeal and literary merit.