The novel “The Life of the World to Come” by Kage Baker was published for the first time in 2004. It’s part of the cycle of the Company.
Mendoza has been exiled in the remote past, where she continues hes work as a botanist on behalf of Dr. Zeus Inc. for such a long time that even a cyborg like har has lost track of it. Her routine goes on until one day a Company shuttle lands in her era and Mendoza realizes that its pilot is identical to the two men she loved in two different times.
Alec Checkerfield was born in the XXIV century and is a special person not only because he’s the heir of a wealthy family. Even as a child he had an understanding of computers so deep to allow him to reprogram his personal assistant turning it into a powerful Artificial Intelligence without his residence staff being aware of anything. Growing up he realizes more and more that he’s different from other people and investigating he discovers how much Dr. Zeus has influenced his life. Blaming the Company as the cause of his and his family’s problems he decides he wants revenge.
“The Life of the World to Come” is one of the novels of the cycle of the Company where some secrets of Dr. Zeus are revealed. In previous novels Mendoza and some other cyborgs put together scraps of information gathered here and there but this novel is set almost entirely in the XXIV century and among the characters there are some scientists who work for the Company.
While in previous novels most of the time Mendoza was an important character in “The Life of the World to Come” she appears only briefly at the beginning and at the end. Her presence is nonetheless important for the bond she has with Alec Checkerfield, the protagonist of this novel. In fact the relationship between him, Nicholas Harpole and Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, the men Mendoza loved in various times, is explained.
In the past Kage Baker wrote some a few stories about Alec Checkerfield and “Smart Alec” (published in the anthology “Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers”) was inserted into the novel as the beginning of his story.
Through Alec’s eyes we see the future of which we had several clues in the Company’s previous novels and short stories. It’s a dystopian future, very puritanical, where anything that can potentially be harmful is prohibited therefore people behavior is strictly regulated.
Dr. Zeus has a monopoly on time travel, allowing its agents to go into the past and among other things to recover lost art objects before they’re destroyed to bring them to the XXIV century, where they are sold for a lot of money. The paradox is that the inhabitants of the future are no longer able to appreciate the art of the past: they have the lost books of the Library of Alexandria and the lost episodes of “Doctor Who” but they just keep them in their collection without even watching them.
Alec Checkerfield becomes a rebel and thanks to the Captain, as he named after pirate Captain Morgan the artificial intelligence he developed, builds his house on a ship. From that base Alec runs his illicit deals of prohibited products such as meat, alcohol and chocolate.
Alec is developed very well from his childhood to his adult life. Kage Baker tells us not only his experiences but also his emotions and desires, making him a very thorough character.
Even scientists who create the Company’s various types of cyborgs are well characterized: they aren’t developed as deeply as Alec because their story has a relatively small part of the novel but their quirks describe them well.
In my opinion, “The Life of the World to Come” is definitely a good novel but as part of a cycle is best read after the previous novels. If you read it on its own you can understand part of the backstory and especially the basic elements because there are many references to the activities of Dr. Zeus. However this is only a chapter in a wider saga so I absolutely recommend it to the people who have read the other novels while my advice to the others is to look for “In the Garden of Iden”, the first novel in this saga.
