“The Golden Torc”, by Julian May

May, Julian. The Golden Torc. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Print.

Here’s an unanticipated problem with writing book reviews… I read the first book in this series, The Many-Colored Land, before I started writing reviews. I guess I’ll have to review both at once, which isn’t too big a hardship.

I’m not sure when I was introduced to this series, but I think it was during high school.  I’m not sure that I can really “review” it properly, because books that you read when young take on their own mythology in your mind.  However, this series is one that I find holds up very well when I re-read it as an adult.  I’ve always been fascinated by how May weaves the future of our planet with the past, with the device of a one-way time portal transporting society’s misfits into the Pleistocene era.  They arrive to find, not the pre-historic paradise they expected, but a well-developed civilization of aliens who were the misfits of their own planet.

There’s a stereotype that says that science fiction novels tend to have poorly-developed characters.  That might be true of mediocre books, and only true sci-fi fans will enjoy those ones, but I’ve always been fascinated by the characters in this series of books.  The core set is a group who went through the time portal at the same time, and their stories overlap and collide throughout the series.

To mention this second book specifically, I think it is my favourite – it has tense pacing, big battles, and some of the bad guys get what they deserve in fairly spectacular ways.  Eventually I’ll get around to reading the third book in the series (probably the next time I’m sick, assuming it has surfaced out of the attic by then), and we’ll see if I decide that *it’s* my favourite.