These Company books are addictive reading. Our broken-hearted, misanthropic, immortal heroine finds herself collecting samples for preservation in Hollywood long before it becomes Hollywood. The Civil War is raging and in California people live in shacks and shoot at strangers just to say hello. With other Company operatives, Mendoza lives in a stagecoach waystation and passes the time with work and thinking about what this place is going to be like in a few decades' time. They even have a film festival, screening Von Stroheim's original nine hour cut of Greed and DW Griffith's Intolerance. Mendoza dreams nightly of her dead mortal lover, Nicholas and contemplates her lot and her future and the pain of being alive.
Okay, that might make it sound a bit of a drag, but Baker excels at character and setting, as well as well as the brain-tickling high concept of the time-traveling Company and its immortal operatives, so she creates a vivid and often very funny picture of life lived at the primitive edge of the American West by a bunch of highly educated people who know what HAS happened and what is going to happen, but who don't necessarily know how to deal with it. The older ones are a bit mad, and the younger ones have harsh lessons to learn about love and loss.
Excellent, fun read; historical science fiction with a strong romantic streak, reminiscent in terms of style of Lois McMaster Bujold and Connie Willis.