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2.0 out of 5 stars
Only To Complete Your Collection..., Jan 30 2002
This hard-to-find book is a companion to the four-book Pliocene Exile Saga by Julian May. (The saga itself was followed by two related series, the Great Intervention and the Galactic Milieu.) I remember way back when these first came out, I was but an ignorant lad and I too readily dismissed them as foolish tripe of the most juvenile sort. I mean, one-way time travel back to the past of Earth's Pliocene era? Where strange aliens ruled? And people ran about, zapping each other with mind powers? Yeah, it sounds hokey, but it's actually really good and quite addictive stuff.In any case, this volume is a reference guide to the saga. It has some nice maps and it reprints three interviews with the author, which are rather informative. It also includes a bibliography of sources that inspired her, references to real poems that were quoted in the saga, and a discussion of why cats are great. The core material, however, isn't so compelling. By deliberate design, May doesn't give away too much about any characters in these listings, so they tend to be very skeletal. A typical entry will read something like "Joe Bloggs was a powerful redactor who lived in Goriah and fought in the Great Tourney. For details, read his adventures in 'The Golden Torc'." Um...okay. By comparison, most guides of this sort for other series will spill their guts about every tangential detail. Also, keep in mind that the guide only covers the Pliocene saga and it treats characters from the other two series only insofar as they had relevance to this first set of novels. So, if you want the lowdown on Rogatien Remillard, for instance, you're out of luck. This is a good book to have if you wish to complete your collection, but is otherwise fairly superfluous.
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