With a publication date of 1981, this isn’t one of my childhood books, but it’s square in my college years, when my science-fiction and fantasy reading accelerated still more. I remember picking this up in the college bookstore and it grabbed me hard right away.
This may be another case of me being unaware, but I’ve never gotten the impression that May’s series has a particularly huge or active fandom. I can’t recall seeing anyone cosplay a character from these books and I have seen some obscure stuff at conventions. I think that’s got to be an accident of timing—if the series had come out twenty years later, I think there would have cosplayers galore devoted to it and might well have been optioned for further adaptation. (I think it would make a great graphic novel or anime, in particular.)
It holds up really well on re-reading, even knowing what’s going to happen next to the characters and where the series as a whole is going. That always seems a great test of genre work. Sometimes a book series is entirely propelled by its plot and once you get to the end, you could care less about ever reading it again. May’s books definitely had a propulsive plot, but the characters and the world-building repay a revisit as well. I also picked up on a number of things this time that I missed on my first few readings back then, including some of the allusions to Western folktales and myths.
Those allusions are the heart of what makes the series so clever. The basic set-up is as follows. In a near-term future, humanity has joined a galactic civilization as its newest member. The other sapient species (four of them) are all telepathic and so too increasingly is humanity. (A lot of these background particulars come out slowly over time.) The Galactic Milieu, as it is known, is a more or less benevolent autocracy bent on evolving towards a higher order of telepathic unity. Some human beings, mostly non-telepaths, find themselves alienated or disaffected from the new ways but the door to genuine rebellion is closed. (We find out later on in the series that this is because a very powerful human telepath and his followers actually did rebel, with enormous costs.)
An accident from a human experiment opens up a one-way gateway to the past, specifically central France in the Pliocene era. It’s not replicable elsewhere: the gateway is tied to a peculiarity of the rock formations underneath the experimental site. The Milieu’s rulers (who include humans) have some sympathy for the eccentrics and delinquents who can’t adjust to the new society and permit humans in groups to go through the gateway into exile. There is no way to ever come back. There’s a few rules: no high-tech weapons, nothing more than you can carry on your person, and no active telepaths are allowed to go. Women who go have to have had tubal ligations so that they cannot become pregnant. The Milieu authorities reason that since people have gone into the Pliocene past already (by the time they get involved, there have been a number who took the trip without authorization) and nothing’s changed in the present, some thousands of humans who can’t reproduce in the Pliocene will live out their lives, have some adventures, do whatever violent things they’re inclined to do, and let the Milieu government get on with making the galaxy a sane and peaceful place.
The book follows one of the authorized groups on its transit into the past. The group includes a woman who was a powerful telepath but whose powers have shut down, apparently for good. There’s also two potentially powerful latent telepaths who are allowed to go—one of them a young criminal who was otherwise going to be euthanized or “docilated” (think Clockwork Orange) and the other a star athlete who wants to really express her violent desires without constraint. May does a good job of creating a group of people who are all misfits or suffering—for some this is very nearly an exotic form of suicide, for others it’s a romantic fantasy. Some are running from failure, others from ennui and dissatisfaction.
Not all the character arcs play out that compellingly in the end. Perhaps May could sense who was not going to be that interesting, because she kills off the most boringly cliched character at the end of the first book. I ended up finding one character who is mooning after his lost love fairly aggravating as well. On rereading, I still found myself vested in many of the characters pretty quickly, especially on arrival in the Pliocene. There’s a great misdirect—you think that the whole thing is going to be about how these characters and other humans relate in a world where there are no rules and there’s a bunch of saber-toothed tigers around, but nope, there’s something else going on. This is where the world-building is just really genius. The characters think they’re stepping through into a world where some thousands of future humans are scattered all over Pliocene Europe having their individual adventures, maybe with a few little towns or settlements here and there. Instead, they discover that Pliocene Europe is under the control of a technologically-advanced alien race who have subjugated the arriving future humans.
The first book mostly is just setting the grand plot of the remaining three books into motion, so there’s a fair amount of exposition as some of the main group of characters are taken off to the alien’s capital city. The others are sorted into a caravan of slaves to be taken to another city further north from the gateway (they escape pretty quickly and link up with a rebel community of humans). The exposition mostly comes gently and in a plausible way—there’s an anthropologist in one group who is charged by the aliens with studying their society, and in particular how the integration of humans into it has affected them, so we listen in as he interviews various characters.
The aliens, it turns out, have a distinctive technology that elevates their own telepathic prowess—devices worn as collars, aka “torcs”, around the neck. And they also activate and sometimes dramatically empower latent human telepaths, who are given high status in the alien society. Moreover, a previous human time traveller has used the advanced medical technology of the aliens to undo the tubal ligations of human women with telepathic powers. And, most importantly, it turns out that human beings and the aliens are able to reproduce. The aliens, called the Tanu, are in fact rather human-like in their appearance: they’re tall, willowy, and by human standards almost unearthly in their beauty, and they live for centuries. The Tanu have found themselves almost infertile on Earth due to higher levels of radiation than on their homeworld, but Tanu-human matings produce children far more readily.
By the last third of the book, you’re getting the idea (and so are one or two of the more educated time-travellers): the Tanu are basically elves or faeries as described in European folklore. And then you find out that the Tanu are actually a species with two very different bodily forms, and there’s another group that call themselves the Firvulag. Who look like dwarves, trolls, leprechauns and ogres. And the Tanu and the Firvulag are not only enemies, their enmity is their religion, and it’s why they ended up on Earth. They’re religious dissidents who fled their home galaxy in one of their species’ living ships because they wanted to maintain their sacred battle-religion, and the desperate space-jump their ship took brought them to Earth, whereupon the ship crashed and died. They’re stuck here, but that suits them fine, because they can keep on fighting in their ritual combats. Only now it’s not so fine because the Tanu are using humanity to dominate their counterparts beyond what the religion calls for.
As the series unfolds, you realize that what seems like an impossible premise (how could there have been an alien-human civilization in the Pliocene without leaving some remnant of its existence?) is actually one of the most clever time-loop non-paradoxes I’ve ever seen in genre literature. The Tanu, Firvulag and human civilization does leave remnants: elves, dwarves, trolls, etc. were real and lived in small, hidden numbers up to the near-present. The stories that unfold in the four Pliocene books are the original versions of many Western myths: there’s a cataclysmic flood, there’s a final battle like Ragnarok, etc. Many of the characters don’t so much resemble famous deities, spirits and so on in Western myth: they are those characters, the original versions. How does that original experience translate into the ur-narratives of modern humanity, considering that modern humans hadn’t evolved yet? The only Pliocene hominid around in the books are ramapithecus—actually, I think if the books were re-written, these would be ardipithecus ramidus—and the aliens have also enslaved those with the torcs and used them as servants before human time-travellers showed up. The implication, I think, is that early hominims pick up some of the myths through telepathic contact with the Tanu-Firvulag-human society, and that as modern humans evolve they’re still interbreeding at times with the dwindling alien-hybrid culture and being told the stories from long ago in the process. Humanity essentially catalyzes its own telepathy and some of its mythology from its own future and from these very familiar aliens.
By the end of the books, the time loops are really airtight in a rather brilliant way—and future humanity learns the truth when a small number of exiles manage to reverse the portal and return to the future, including a few of the Tanu and Firvulag. (Most choose, for various reasons, to remain—and the portal in the future is closed, so no more time travellers will arrive.)
The only thing that I think doesn’t quite work is that in the last two books, the ultra-powerful human rebel and his followers, a man named Marc Remillard, suddenly becomes central to the series. He’s a very interesting character but we never get the full story about him when he takes center stage, because May was planning to tell that story in a separate series of books that would follow the Pliocene Exile series. She did write those books and they’re good, but not nearly as great as this series—to some extent she builds up Remillard’s rebellion so much that it can’t quite live up to the advance billing. If anybody did ever try to adapt this series, they’d have to figure out how to handle the background story of the rebellion a bit better than May does in these four books—it turns out to be vitally important to understand just what it was that Remillard was trying to accomplish with his rebellion and honestly, I only really fully understood it on this re-reading.
There’s just so much to like in the series—there’s four or five character arcs that are compelling, the description of telepathic powers and the way they’re used in the action scenes throughout is terrific, and the underlying game of “spot the mythological allusion in this character or scene” is a ton of fun. On re-reading, I was also struck that there’s a couple of dangling loose threads (none that undo the tight weave of the time travel elements) that are not taken up in subsequent books, and one of them is pretty frustrating. I poked around the Internet a bit this morning and I did find fans of the books discussing the same loose end (on Livejournal, among other places—there’s a trip into what feels like the distant past but in fact it’s really not very long ago). May died in 2017 and never seems to have directly addressed these questions—you could imagine a sequel series that dealt with the slow fading of the Pliocene culture around the time of early homo sapiens settlement of Western Europe, I suppose.
I started this series in the Way Back but had too much going on to continue it. Maybe one for the future.