I'm of two minds about this series (the "Company" books), and in particular this book, which I started last night. On the plus side, the plot itself is really interesting, involving a conspiracy across all of history, aliens (or maybe not), time travel, immortal cyborgs, and psychic powers. Looking at that list, it sounds like some sort of even-more-horrible-than-the-original Illuminatus ripoff, but it's really not. Also, unlike those books, you actually care about the characters.

But the downside is Baker's incredibly ham-handed attempts at making some sort of libertarian political point. In the future, England and the US are starting to outlaw things like alcohol, chocolate, cigarettes, etc. I think she's trying to make some sort of point about the dangers of a nanny society, but it's just done so incredibly badly!

She also conflates things like veganism and animal rights with attempts to outlaw, say, chocolate. This just drives me nuts. Is she so dense that cannot tell the difference between "do not harm others" and "do not harm yourself"? The former is a moral principle that most societies include in one form or another. Extending the protection of that principle to animals is clearly controversial and at this point in time not the majority viewpoint, but it's very, very different from attempting to control people's personal behavior where it doesn't affect others.

I wouldn't mind it so much if it was funny, but it's just not, which is particularly jarring since so much of the rest of the series is full of great wit. I think that to make a strong political point in a work of fiction, it takes a lot of care, though certainly it has been successfully done. Probably my favorite example is Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. The key to that one, IMHO, is that Le Guin was careful to show the downsides to her "utopian" society. It's obvious to the reader that she thinks it has a lot of promise, particularly in contrast to our current system, but she also explores how it can go wrong.

The key is the balance. If Le Guin just wrote about how great it was, you'd quickly get annoyed at her failure to address any potential problems. Baker does the opposite, hammering away at the problems without showing any upsides. Of course, in her proposed future there aren't any upsides, but that in itself is just goofy.

Anyway, I'm still enjoying Baker's series, but I do worry that as events move farther into the future, it'll get progressively more ham-handed. That'd be a shame, since the first few books were so enjoyable. I do have hopes that she'll somehow integrate the satire into the larger conspiracy plot, since if the nanny society she describes were a deliberate conspiracy to dumb down the population, that'd be a lot more plausible in the context of the fictional world she's created.