Clare L. Deming

The Many-Colored Land is the first book in the Saga of Pliocene Exile by Julian May (paid links). I had never read anything by this author, but this book was proposed as a selection for one of my book clubs, so I picked it up. This book was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula Award and won a Locus Award.

Here is the blurb:

In the year 2034, Theo Quderian, a French physicist, made an amusing but impractical the means to use a one-way, fixed-focus time warp that opened into a place in the Rhone River valley during the idyllic Pliocene Epoch, six million years ago. But, as time went on, a certain usefulness developed. The misfits and mavericks of the future—many of them brilliant people—began to seek this exit door to a mysterious past. In 2110, a particularly strange and interesting group was preparing to make the journey—a starship captain, a girl athlete, a paleontologist, a woman priest, and others who had reason to flee the technological perfection of twenty-second-century life.

The group that passes through the time-portal finds an unforeseen strangeness on the other side. Far from being uninhabited, Pliocene Europe is the home of two warring races from another planet. There is the knightly race of the Tanu—handsome, arrogant, and possessing vast powers of psychokinesis and telepathy. And there is the outcast race of Firvulag—dwarfish, malev-o olent, and gifted with their own supernormal skills.

Taken captive by the Tanu and transported through the primordial European landscape, the humans manage to break free, join in an uneasy alliance with the forest-dwelling Firvulag, and, finally, launch an attack against the Tanu city of light on the banks of a river that, eons later, would be called the Rhine. Myth and legend, wit and violence, speculative science and breathtaking imagination mingle in this romantic fantasy, which is the first volume in a series about the exile world. The sequel, titled The Golden Torc, will follow soon.

While the concept of this novel was quite intriguing, this book was challenging for me to enjoy. The story is told through numerous points of view, and at the beginning of the book I struggled to keep each character straight and to understand how they related to a coherent story. Eventually it is clear that these are the characters that are going to travel back in time to the Pliocene, but I think it would have been easier to follow this opening if the story had started closer to the point at which they begin their journey.

Once they arrive in Pliocene Europe, the book was better, but I still found it hard to identify with the characters. They encountered some difficult conditions there and each character’s personality created different responses to this unique world state, but I also found that I struggled to like or care about any of the characters.

Some positive aspects of this book were that the idea of traveling back in time on a one-way journey is always fun to explore. Part of me does want to discover what happened to this Pliocene land and how the alien Tanu and Firvulag arrived and made it their home. I’m not sure that’s enough to convince me to invest the time to read the next book (The Golden Torc), but I’d consider a different series by the author (paid link).

Have you read any books by Julian May? Which ones do you recommend? Let me know in the comments (above).

Find more of my reviews here.