I'm re-reading Julian
May's 'Saga of the Pliocene Exiles' for the first time in a decade or
two. I love the fecundity of the world-building, the audacity and
inventiveness of the premise, the vast submerged mass of information
about the Galactic Milieu that is out there hidden from our sight; I
like the outre characters. As a long-time RPGer, I like the gamified
classification of psionic powers. I don't mind the lack of character
development many reviewers complain about. After all, the main
characters are either denizens of the Land of Faerie - whose
characters cannot develop as a literary convention - or profoundly
messed-up people subjected either to compulsory happification or
brutalisation that is only likely to mess them up further. Even the
way the two most unlikeable male characters are unconvincingly
transformed by 'True Love' is reasonable if you assume they are
wartime romances that are not going to last: the female Exile
population would be rich in the sort of sad cases who fall for men
like that, and that kind of desperate clutching at affection is
common under that sort of stress.
But as a story...
coming back to it... it is not my kind of story. It is not the way I
would have done it. All the glorious world-building is frittered
away. For me, at any rate.
My many years of GMing
have conditioned me to prefer the 'slow unfolding of a mystery' to
'whirlwind of action' and I would have written this story as more of
the former.
Even though the society
of the Galactic Milieu is less pathologically risk-averse than our
lame-arse one, it still seems unlikely that they would let Madame
Guderian send people willy-nilly back through time for sixty years
without regulating her in any way, and stranger that they would just
take over her enterprise and keep it running without doing any
investigations of their own. It doesn't make sense that Madame
Guderian would just have kept going, after the third or fourth time
she sent a time-traveller off with amber tablets and instructions on
how to attempt to get a message back to her, and heard zip. Or, that
she wouldn't have communicated her suspicions to someone else. So, in
a more realistic, plot rather than action-driven scenario, the third
or fourth time she would have gotten a message back saying things
were initially bad in this area, but now it is secure, and we're all
fine here thanks, how are you? And over time a whole plausible story
could have been built up mirroring the 22nd century expectations
about what the Pliocene is like, feeding information to improve the
chances of future Exiles and coincidentally milking the future for
particular items and materials wanted in the past. On the basis of
this plausible story, it makes sense that the Milieu would keep the
business rolling after Madame Guderian steps through the portal
herself. The first novel will end as the characters
step through and discover this story is a complete fabrication.
Actually, no, thinking
about it that will drag the pre-story out too long. Instead, Group
Green will arrive in the Pliocene halfway through the first novel,
and find that superficially it appears much as reported - the Tanu
will stay well in the background at Castle Gateway and it will all be
carefully managed to stop information from leaking back into the
future. Only as they travel on to the next stage, in the second half
of the volume, will the fabrication emerge.
As written, the
procedure for handling the time-travellers at the Pliocene end is
incredibly messed-up. There would be a procedure for stripping
incomers of blood-metal artefacts: it is not hard to drag them off
for a delousing and have some human who can recognise iron go through
their loot. And so much of the future plot hinges on the ridiculous
accident of Felice's latent superpowers not being picked up: it is
silly, and it wouldn't have happened. In my version they will be
smoothly processed and carted off in appropriate directions without
unseemly violence, and Felice will have to escape later.
Now, in this second
half of the first bit, while the fabrication is revealed, the full
malignity of Tanu intentions will be hidden from the characters, and
from us. That can wait until book two. The enemy in book one can be
the Firvulag: they don't control Castle Gateway, but
are obviously keen to deny the Tanu the use of the humans, and make
use of the more valuable ones: they can attack the northern party and
capture them, and it can be they, rather than the Tanu, who subject
their captives to a brutal sorting process. I know this makes the
human characters more dried leaves tossed by the winds of fate than
the Omnipotent Captains of Their Destinies, but damn it, at this
stage they should be victims of fate, and that whole
John-Campbellesque 'aren't we humans just so damn precious and
special?' shtick is soooo 20th century.
I would like a whole
second novel of Group Green's largely peaceful integration/failure to
integrate into the world all that world-building went into: let us
care about them, and the people who are already there, as people
rather than hyperkinetic action figures. Through the course of this
book, it will become apparent that the Tanu, as well as being liars,
are considerably blacker than we thought at the end of book one; and
the Firvulag considerably greyer. Layered over this, I would
introduce a second group of 'special' time travellers, Group
Aquamarine, say, whose back story will move more quickly than Group
Green's. This group will contain as one of its members a retired
member of the Portal Administration who has been reviewing all the
correspondence going back through Madame Guderian's time - it has not
been that long that the Milieu has been operating the Portal, after
all - and has isolated all sorts of puzzling inconsistencies in the
data. So he/she/it (why have no mentally-unbalanced Simbiari taken
the plunge into the Pliocene, anyhow?) has volunteered for a one-way
fact-finding mission to ascertain the facts on the ground and send a
report back.
And then, well, in
books three and four we can let loose with all the action scenes and
wholesale slaughter.
That's how I would have
done it.
