In The Garden of Iden (Company, volume 1) by Kage Baker

[james_davis_nicoll]

A timid immortal cyborg searches for valuable plants in a Tudor England torn between Anglicans and Catholics. What could possibly go wrong?

In The Garden of Iden (Company, volume 1) by Kage Baker

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

PS: The Company seems very anglo-philic, seeing Elizabeth as one of the (few) good mortals, etc. Later books have similar suggestions of Britain-centred thinking.

(also there's a surprise (very brief) Heinlein reference)

[autopope]

My read on the Company is that it's a riff on the British East India Company, only colonial-extractive in time rather than territory.

[(Anonymous)]

That tracks.

[jreynoldsward]

Agreed--and it's not a casual connection, either. But I've also read the entire series. It becomes more explicit as time goes on and, well, since I live in a place where the Hudson's Bay Company was the first colonial presence, followed by miners and timber companies, it's pretty easy for me to see the connection.

(Here Before Christ deliberately set out to create a "fur desert" throughout what became eastern Oregon and Idaho in an attempt to thwart American fur trapping companies. And yes, that was the common epithet for HBC amongst US elements....)