Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed, but still a magnificent fantasy epic, April 12 2009
I first read this series years ago (this book is the first of the four-part Pliocene Exile saga), and I still have a deep and abiding love for it. I reread it perhaps once every five years or so, and never fail to be drawn into its melodrama.
Any detailed discussion of what happens past the first part of the first book inevitably involves spoilers, so I will simply say that its scope is truly epic, its plots at times Byzantine, and its cosmos finely detailed to a degree that will please the most "old-school" of sci-fi/fantasy readers. Certainly not for everyone, but this series will remain on my shelf for as long as I have books.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
The Pliocene revisited, May 7 2002
I first read the Saga of the Exiles when it came out, and remember being quite impressed. Recently I read it again and am amazed at the uncritical adulation this series receives. I appreciate that fantasy fans love their books long, and many-volumed. (a yearning for ancient grimoires?). I appreciate that they can't get too many weird names, genaeologies and knightly battlecries. However this series has about one good novel's worth of material in it.
The human characters to a man or woman are caricatures and stereotypes. The "exotics" are cobbled together bits of Tolkien and various human myths. Everyone, including aliens, speaks "Standard English" which sounds like the script from a sixties high school movie. The plot is ultra-simplistic - good v evil, light v dark,...Blonde, glowing Tanu (teutonic?) knights against the gnarled, shape-shifting, devious, accquisitive, Firvulag. Familiar? There is endless speechifying, sex and violence which is frequently gratuitious and just as frequently laughable, and confusion throughout as to which characters the author wants us to empathise with. Parts of the books read like geology textbooks, and others like "A Child's Guide to Celtic Mythology". As a Celt I particularly resent the liberties taken with my heritage in order to satisfy the limitless American capactiy for wanting to be Irish (or Scottish).
These books are overblown, overwritten, and overrated. They may not even be healthy
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Eternity never looked so good, Jan 9 2001
An incredible tale of adventure and excitement that draws you in , holds your attention for six million years, then spits you back into the real world, dazed and confused. Early in the 22nd Century, humanity has joined a benevolent federation of psychicly operant aliens (Star Trek eat your heart out.) But not everyone enjoys this brave new world. For the misfits and undesirables, an escape route exists - a one way trip to Pliocene Earth, six million years in the past. We follow the adventures of Group Green, this weeks "tour group" as they discover that the past isn't exactly what we imagined. Felice Landry - maladjusted sports star,unloved and unloving, she confuses pleasure and pain. Robert Voorhees - ex-pilot and space trader, banished to the past for putting profit before his humanity. Stein Olsen - deep miner, a Viking born centuries too late. Brian Grenfell - anthropoligist and expert in social interactions, chasing his lost love . Claude Majewski - retired paleontoligist and widower, come to see the past for himself. Amerie Chan - dedicated Sister (the nun sort), seeking a life of religous hermitage. Aiken Drum - mischevious non-born, child of a test tube, banished to a time when his practical jokes can hurt no-one. Elizabeth Orm - ex Grand Master Psychic, victim of a horrific accident that stole her life mate and her awesome mental powers, fleeing a world filled with reminders of what she lost .These eight will change the past, and so create the future.
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by Julian May
by Julian May
by Julian May
