My Weekly Book

We’ve started this series (once again being read out loud) in an attempt to fill the hole in our reading lives opened up by the completion in March of the entire sweep of Modesty Blaise novels. Feeling daunted by the sheer scale of Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin saga, and yet wanting something with a bit of staying power, this eight (or sometimes nine) volume science fiction epic seemed like an excellent choice - and so it has proved.

This opening volume tells the story of an ill-assorted group of humans who, weary of life on 22nd-century Earth and its colony planets, decide to make the ultimate trip west. They do this via a discovery made by a French scientist of a one-way ‘time gate’ leading to the Vosges region of France during Earth’s Pliocene epoch - six million years in the past. However Professor Guderian was acutely aware of the limitations of his discovery - the voyage through the time-gate was a one-way affair, to a fixed point in the past, and no traveller had every succeeded in getting a message back to communicate information about what lay across the threshold.

After the death of the professor his widow ran the time-gate as a commercial concern for a time, and then with an almost evangelical belief in the service she was providing. Eventually, consumed with curiosity and guilt about what lay on the other side, she made the trip herself. Now the human part of the Galactic Milieu sees the time-gate as the ideal way to get rid of its undesirables and no-one is asking questions about what fate awaits them. The first volumes in this series follow the adventures of the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ who make the journey (although in what sphere they succeed or fail, and who does the judging, I’ll leave you to find out for yourselves) and shows how they react to their new-found circumstances.

This summary, in its attempt to avoid spoilers, seriously fails to do justice to the plot of The Many-Coloured Land which, written firmly in the tradition of the best golden-age science fiction, has an imaginative scope and a richness of context that is enviable and unusual. Cover blurbs predict that it will one day attain the status of Tolkien; I suspect that it is far too unsentimental ever to earn itself that accolade. But it does have that sheer, absorbing scale combined with a jeweller’s eye for details which makes for the very best alternative universe fiction. And the setting is not foregrounded in such a way that it gets under the feet of the plot.

Really major recommendations include the ability to weave plot strands together without losing hold of any one of them; confident handling of a large cast of ensemble characters; a cogent underlying mythos; and a depth of engagement with both science and folklore that is not frequently found in contemporary fantasy or science fiction (this was published in the early 1980s). I love May’s explanation for how various recurring tropes and archetypes in western culture came to achieve their dominance, but I was also caught up in the story. The best recommendation I can give is to say that we picked up The Golden Torc, the second volume in the series, and read on more or less straight from where we had left off at the beginning of The Many-Coloured Land.

Tags: archetypes, folklore, golden-age science fiction, Julian May, Pliocene earth, The Saga of the Exiles

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 5:30 pm and is filed under 2008 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.