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A review by thinde
The Many-Coloured Land by Julian May
4.0
The "Many-Colored Land" was the novel that started me on a reading frenzy that has lasted to this day. I read it in my first year of university. It was chosen mainly out of boredom and a liking for the cover art. Wow, I couldn't buy and read the rest of the series fast enough. There were "The Golden Torc" and "The Nonborn King" and they were better than the first. The last in the series, "The Adversary", was not written at that time and I spent an agonizing year waiting for it. In the meantime, I started reading other authors to feed my newborn habit.
The plot is too complex to cover in the few paragraphs that I am willing to write here. In fact, the story is expanded by several more novels that Julian May has since written. The Saga of the Pliocene Exiles mainly follows a group of people who are irrevocably exiled back in time to the Pliocene era. Not to worry, this is not a dinosaur story. This is the period between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of homo sapiens, six million years ago.
Some of the group has voluntarily chosen exile to escape their lives in the twenty-first century. A century that has seen the rise of extrasensory powers in humanity and the introduction of the planet to a galactic community as a result. Our time traveling companions travel through a one-way time portal, trained and ready to start a new life in the distant past. They expect to find some sort of civilization when they arrive, presumably created by fifty years of prior time travelers. Fair warning though. To get to this point in the novel you will have to be patient as there are several chapters devoted to the short term history of each member of the group. This is necessary to tell us why they are going back but may seem, to some readers, a little dull. All I can say is stick with it.
I won't spoil it for those who I hope are going to read these books. However, I will say that the group is very surprised at what they find when they arrive safely in the Pliocene. The remainder of May's series follows each character through a rich tapestry of diverging and reconverging subplots. Our central group is eventually responsible for changing the world - and not merely on Earth, six million years ago.
The plot is too complex to cover in the few paragraphs that I am willing to write here. In fact, the story is expanded by several more novels that Julian May has since written. The Saga of the Pliocene Exiles mainly follows a group of people who are irrevocably exiled back in time to the Pliocene era. Not to worry, this is not a dinosaur story. This is the period between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the rise of homo sapiens, six million years ago.
Some of the group has voluntarily chosen exile to escape their lives in the twenty-first century. A century that has seen the rise of extrasensory powers in humanity and the introduction of the planet to a galactic community as a result. Our time traveling companions travel through a one-way time portal, trained and ready to start a new life in the distant past. They expect to find some sort of civilization when they arrive, presumably created by fifty years of prior time travelers. Fair warning though. To get to this point in the novel you will have to be patient as there are several chapters devoted to the short term history of each member of the group. This is necessary to tell us why they are going back but may seem, to some readers, a little dull. All I can say is stick with it.
I won't spoil it for those who I hope are going to read these books. However, I will say that the group is very surprised at what they find when they arrive safely in the Pliocene. The remainder of May's series follows each character through a rich tapestry of diverging and reconverging subplots. Our central group is eventually responsible for changing the world - and not merely on Earth, six million years ago.