Overlooked classic: Julian May’s Pliocene Exile series

(Discussion of this post on Reddit’s r/printSF)

For the last few years, I’ve been going back and re-reading sci-fi books that I loved long ago, to see what I think of them decades later.

One series that held up very well is Julian May’s Pliocene Exile series, comprising The Many-Colored Land, The Golden Torc, The Nonborn King, and The Adversary. It’s a time-travel sci-fi series, where misfits from future Earth, circa 2110 A.D., travel back to the Earth of six million years before, which is unexpectedly occupied by two warring alien races, who are uncannily reminiscent of the elves and dwarves of human legend. I won’t spoil it for you, but May tells a huge story over these four books, stuffed with inventive and original ideas.

How can I call this series “overlooked” when the first book won a Locus award back in 1981, and all four of them have hundreds of Amazon reviews? Well, it’s because it doesn’t seem like May was ever as popular as her talents warranted, and now she’s sort of fallen in the cracks, not quite famous enough to be widely celebrated.

May’s background as a writer of thousands of science encyclopedia articles (!) gave her a wide knowledge of a vast array of topics, and when you read her work, you can feel that coming through. She didn’t over-pack her books with obvious or boring research. But a casual mention of a single word that you’d never seen before, or her clever descriptions of how her invented systems of future technology and psychic powers worked, made it feel like there was a whole world of plausibility there behind the page.

The editions shown here in my picture aren’t all the same ones I read as a child—I had to re-buy some of them used to complete my collection again, since they had gone missing over the years. They seem to be out of print now, and it looks like the covers have changed several times since the 80s. Still, the series is easily available either used or on Kindle, and is well worth a read.