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A review by oleksandr
The Many-Colored Land by Julian May
2.0
This is a SF novel that mixed a lot of themes. The book was nominated for Nebula, Hugo and Locus Awards after it was published in 1981. I read is as a part of monthly reading for March 2020 at SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.
This review contains spoilers for setting up the story, but not of how the story went off. Because it is the first volume of the trilogy, the setting is quite long, roughly a third of the book.
Humans made contact with extraterrestrials in the early XIX century, allowing to solve Earth environmental problems, settle hundreds of colonies and allowing for very long and productive lives due to rejuvenation and regeneration. Moreover, latent psychic powers are liberated, so there are telepaths, kinetics, pyromancers among humans.
On the basis of new knowledge a human scientist created a time travel machine, which can go only in one direction – past, all 6 million years of it – to Pliocene. The scientist dies, but his widow started to use the machine to send to the past all misfits, who ask for it.
There are quite a few characters presented by the author: an anthropologist Bryan, who follows his love; a giant berserk of a man, Stein Oleson, who dreams of going a-Viking; a disgraced space captain Richard Voorhees; a female athlete and emphate Felice Landry from high-gravity world, striving to be accepted as she is; a telepath Elizabeth Orme, who after regeneration lost her talent; a sociopath Aiken Drum; Sister Annamaria Roccaro and Polish exopaleontologist Claude Majewski, who lost his wife and decided to leave the world.
The abovementioned people are grouped together and sent to the past only to find out that there are remnants of extraterrestrial civilization from another galaxy…
I’m sure that I’d have ranked this action-adventure book very high as a teen. It is not a YA novel, most characters are quite mature and there are some adult themes, but the wealth of world-building is great: time travel, psi-powers, aliens, pirates, knights, dwarfs you name it. However right now I see that it is not a serious SF, more an excuse for great adventure with extremely unlikely coincidences and attempts to wove aliens into European folklore (erm, the earliest human ancestor usually assigned to Australopithecus species, who lived 2 million years later than the time period of the book and in Africa, not Europe).
This review contains spoilers for setting up the story, but not of how the story went off. Because it is the first volume of the trilogy, the setting is quite long, roughly a third of the book.
Humans made contact with extraterrestrials in the early XIX century, allowing to solve Earth environmental problems, settle hundreds of colonies and allowing for very long and productive lives due to rejuvenation and regeneration. Moreover, latent psychic powers are liberated, so there are telepaths, kinetics, pyromancers among humans.
On the basis of new knowledge a human scientist created a time travel machine, which can go only in one direction – past, all 6 million years of it – to Pliocene. The scientist dies, but his widow started to use the machine to send to the past all misfits, who ask for it.
There are quite a few characters presented by the author: an anthropologist Bryan, who follows his love; a giant berserk of a man, Stein Oleson, who dreams of going a-Viking; a disgraced space captain Richard Voorhees; a female athlete and emphate Felice Landry from high-gravity world, striving to be accepted as she is; a telepath Elizabeth Orme, who after regeneration lost her talent; a sociopath Aiken Drum; Sister Annamaria Roccaro and Polish exopaleontologist Claude Majewski, who lost his wife and decided to leave the world.
The abovementioned people are grouped together and sent to the past only to find out that there are remnants of extraterrestrial civilization from another galaxy…
I’m sure that I’d have ranked this action-adventure book very high as a teen. It is not a YA novel, most characters are quite mature and there are some adult themes, but the wealth of world-building is great: time travel, psi-powers, aliens, pirates, knights, dwarfs you name it. However right now I see that it is not a serious SF, more an excuse for great adventure with extremely unlikely coincidences and attempts to wove aliens into European folklore (erm, the earliest human ancestor usually assigned to Australopithecus species, who lived 2 million years later than the time period of the book and in Africa, not Europe).