Disposable Lit Reviews

Del Rey, 1981/1988
429 pp.
ISBN 0-345-32444-7

Buy it from Amazon.com
or eBay or Half.com

I burned out on category fantasy in high school, and I haven’t been back for twenty years except for rare incursions such as re-reading Tolkien. (Which isn’t really category fantasy, as it predates the category.) I will occasionally peruse some heroic fantasy in the vein of Howard, but the standard high or epic fantasy normally leaves me cold. Over exposure in my youth and all that.

That probably explains why Julian May’s The Many-Colored Land (first volume of The Saga of Pliocene Exile) lost favor with me as it inexorably transmuted from something akin to space opera — “time opera,” maybe? — to something that smacked desperately of epic fantasy dressed up in sci-fi’s clothing.

The setting is the latter half of the 21st century, which has become the Galactic Milieu; humanity has been contacted by four other aligned alien races which shared their technology and interstellar real estate and general cosmopolitan lifestyle with Earth. Terrans have spread out to the stars, either mixing with their extraterrestrial compatriots or living in colonies founded along distinct ethnic lines (Scandinavian planets, New Zealander planets, etc.). Earth is now almost entirely an historic preserve, with retro-cultural recreations and festivals entertaining a constant flood of offworlder tourist traffic with idealized and sanitized versions of the past.

The aliens also help us access our psychic abilities, bringing latent “metafunctions” to operancy and allowing a goodly number of telepaths, clairvoyants, telekinetics, etc.

But even in this new golden age of peace and prosperity, there are malcontents: hopeless romantics, incurable sociopaths, religious hermits, vociferous xenophobes. There is no place in the Galactic Milieu where such feel happy and content. There is nowhere they can go to live the lives they feel they were born for.

Except the past.

Decades earlier, a French scientist discovered that he could create a time portal to the Pliocene. It was little more than a novelty; the portal was apparently dependent on the geophysics of that particular location, and thus could not be relocated to explore other locales. It was tied to an era six million years ago, missing both the novelty of the age of dinosaurs and the beginnings of humanity’s own historic past. And though objects and living beings could be sent to the past, any trip in the opposite direction caused the time traveling subject to experience six million years of decay at once and crumble instantly into dust. The only recorded instance of time travel proved to be useless for exploration or exploitation.

But some heard of the time portal and wanted what it offered: a one-way trip to an unspoiled, uncivilized land. So they went through — first by ones and twos, and then in larger groups as word spread. By the time of this novel, about eighty thousand people had willingly gone into Exile with simple biodegradable conveniences and newly-acquired subsistence skills. Our story follows several misfits who are scheduled to depart at the same time and thus are put together as a team: a confidence man who doesn’t respond to social training; a powerful operant psychic who had lost all metabilities after a brain trauma; a nun seeking a hermitage which no order left will allow in the modern world; a widowered paleantologist who wants to spend his last days among the animals he’s studied intimately all his days; a romantic professor following his loved-from-afar heartmate into Exile; a man-hating teenaged sports star from a French-Canadian (!) colony world; and a couple of fellows who simply feel they were meant for the lives of berserkers and pirates.

Their main trepidation (apart from never seeing a flush toilet or a Mountain Dew again) is that no one really knows how things have developed in the Pliocene. Aside from being pretty sure that those going into Exile arrive there alive, there’s no way to tell what the 80,000 people who’ve already gone through have made of their new lives. Have they descended into barbarity? Divided into warring factions? Been largely decimated by disease and exposure?

On their designated day, they steel themselves, step into the time portal…

…and here is where it starts running off the rails for me.

I had some early niggling doubts. The whole Galactic Milieu as a backdrop struck me as a misstep for a couple of reasons; I find it hard to swallow the idea that in a cosmos spread with human and alien colonies dotting the (apparently limitless) habitable planets, there would be no other less extreme options for escape left to these social misfits, or even that the separate colonies (based, as I mentioned, on discrete Earth cultures and ethnicities) are homogenized enough by the Milieu to keep dissatisfied individuals from finding some settlement in which they can fit in. Instead of a farflung multi-species galactic civilization, I think a far more effective backdrop would have been a crowded but socialized-to-efficiency Earth with maybe a few pressurized colonies around the solar system, where there literally was nowhere to escape to than into the past.

But I was willing to let that slide, because the majority of the story over the four books would be separated from the Galactic Milieu. I was looking forward to, and hoping for, a solidly exploratory tale of the kind of society that would be created by people plopped into a pristine uncivilized world with modern knowledge and culture but scant tools and resources.

Instead… as soon as they get through the portal, the Exiles find that the Pliocene is already occupied by the Tanu, a very humanlike alien race that were themselves extra-galactic refugees who had started a colony on this very habitable world. The main Tanu technology contained in torcs they wear around their necks (the most obvious example here of Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology” dictum) gives them meta functions as great as most human psychics which have let them from a pseudo-feudal society with the displaced humans pressed into service in a semi-benign dictatorship. The Tanu are tall, regal, long-lived, given to wearing rich brocades and other frumpery, and love to use the native beast of burden for midnight rides and grand hunts. In other words, yes, they’re evil elves.

And, as a few humans who escape them find, the Tanu have their own dark analog: the Firvulag, the more-than-occasional changeling children of the Tanu who are ceremonially left out in the wilds. The Firvulag are ugly and misshapen, though their most common meta power is that of illusion, whereby they show themselves to each other and to the few free humans as either stunning beings or slavering monsters. Yes, these are mythologies darker dwarves and gnomes brought into an ostensible science fictional setting; I think the adjective “gnomish” was even used to describe them more than once.

The discrete plot of this first book of the series, after getting our viewpoint characters to the Pliocene and introducing the world they find, revolves around an unsteady alliance between the few renegade humans and the Firvulag to depose the Tanu via weapons that could possibly be found at the original crash site of the aliens’ ship. The humans also discover that the Tanu (and Firvulag) meta functions are entirely negated by iron weapons, as if there weren’t mythology enough in this setup. In fact, it seems that the further we get into the saga, the less substantive SF content there is, apart from the occasional lip service, and the more reliance on mythic tropes and folklore, as the author cheerfully acknowledges in the afterward. And despite the cherry-picked humans who include a paleantologist with geological side training, not a soul mentions that the almost-human appearance of the Tanu in this era before human evolution (our family tree being represented by ramapithecines) is waaaaaay too much of a coincidence for there not to be Tanu heritage in the eventual human race.

I’ve got other volumes of the series on my shelf. I don’t know if I’ll continue or not. I would have to be in a mood more forgiving of fantasy series novels than I was when I picked up this fantasy-in-SF’s-clothing first book.