Julian May (1931-2017)
October 21, 2017 11:09 AM   Subscribe

Science fiction author Julian May has passed away at age 86: "In Memoriam: Julian May" from the SFWA; "May the Force Be With Her," a profile related to her First Fandom Hall of Fame Award; Chicon II / TASFIC entry at Fancyclopedia 3 ("Julian May was the first female chairman of a Worldcon"); "Julian May," her entry in The Encyclopedia of SF; her ISFDB entry; interviews with May from 1982 and 2015. Perhaps best known for her Saga of Pliocene Exile (a brief appreciation; B&N retrospective; TVTropes entry), May's first SF story sales are available online ("Dune Roller" Astounding, Dec. 1951, with illustrations by May; "Star of Wonder," Thrilling Wonder Stories, Feb. 1953) along with several letters to Astounding: 1, 2, and 3.
posted by Wobbuffet (51 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
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posted by doctornemo at 11:13 AM on October 21, 2017




The first letter to the editor references Encabulators with sly subtle wit, I suspect there is rather more between the lines.
posted by sammyo at 11:25 AM on October 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


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posted by mikelieman at 11:31 AM on October 21, 2017


When I was 13 I found the three Pliocene books in attractive British paperback editions languishing on a back shelf in a duty-free store in the Hong Kong airport. I devoured them, and they were instrumental for young me seeing that science-fiction could also be gritty and political as well as sweeping and aspirational. Remarkable how many of the characters and their names I can still remember more than 30 years later. Very formative experience reading those books for me. (Also her rational and more nuanced take on Psionic powers completely ruined the D&D version for me.)

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posted by seasparrow at 11:37 AM on October 21, 2017 [11 favorites]


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posted by Lynsey at 11:44 AM on October 21, 2017


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posted by DreamerFi at 12:00 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by HillbillyInBC at 12:02 PM on October 21, 2017


I consider the Exiles Saga to be the best SF series bar none, and criminally under-appreciated to the point that it regularly falls out of print and when in print rarely sees bookstore shelves. The adaptation rights are held by a small British creature effects house that doesn’t seem to have the ability to do a deal of the scale required to bring to screen. I hope the family makes something happen on that front before they start to license posthumous sequels and prequels.
posted by MattD at 12:15 PM on October 21, 2017 [10 favorites]


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posted by Fizz at 12:19 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by foleypt at 12:23 PM on October 21, 2017


Came to say more or less what seasparrow did.

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posted by mordax at 12:29 PM on October 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Between her Rampart Worlds trilogy and The Pliocene Exile Saga and the Galactic Milieu Series which followed, her work was intricate, creative and oh-so-much-fun to read. One of the very best authors.

She's left us a rich universe to enjoy.

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posted by zarq at 12:29 PM on October 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


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Greatly enjoyed The Pliocene Exile in (Danish) translation as a kid—a truly masterful saga with plenty of unforgettable characters from Abaddon himself over Aiken Drum, Elizabeth, and Felice. It was only relatively recently that I discovered that Julian could also be a female name.
posted by bouvin at 12:46 PM on October 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


Loved the Pilocene Exile as a child. I still have the well-loved books, but they're falling apart having been read too much.

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posted by YAMWAK at 1:23 PM on October 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


For me, thinking about the Pliocene Exile saga cues warm memories of things like sitting on a couch in the front of the physics building at a local university, reading while waiting for my grandmother to pick me up. The books later inspired an RPG campaign I ran in which the players had to come ready with ordinary, late 20th C. characters who all had well-considered reasons to go through a one-way portal millions of years into the future (essentially a gateway to the world of After Man plus aliens)--still a memorable campaign to the players, who I think spent a lot of time on their characters' rationales for self-exile.
posted by Wobbuffet at 1:51 PM on October 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


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posted by neushoorn at 1:54 PM on October 21, 2017


I thought for many years that she was male based on her name. I was happy to be proven wrong after I'd read some of her work because it made me lose the bias I had harbored (women can't write science fiction. Yeah.)

She was a great writer and I'm sad she's passed.

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posted by disclaimer at 2:59 PM on October 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


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posted by dancing_angel at 3:18 PM on October 21, 2017


The Pliocene Exile / Galactic Milieu series is one of my absolutely favorite *series* in SF - like I have individual books I like far more than individual items in the series, but those books are far more than the sum of their parts. The way each of the two halves effectively uses the other half as that deep backstory that makes a series work so well? Super good.
posted by xiw at 3:24 PM on October 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


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posted by Kattullus at 3:44 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by jzed at 4:24 PM on October 21, 2017


the exiles trilogy was great, really high quality epic pulp. Worth a read, though some of the events might raise woke eyebrows like the entire Felice Landry story (which is arguably the core of the whole 6 book series if you think her demise produces the Carbuncle from the prequels...)
posted by Sebmojo at 4:51 PM on October 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


Natalie Luhrs's website was down earlier today, or I would have linked her generally appreciative re-read in the body of the post--it covers some issues as well: The Many-Colored Land, The Golden Torc, The Nonborn King, The Adversary, The Surveillance, The Metaconcert, and Jack the Bodiless.
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:12 PM on October 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


I'm not much of a re-reader, but i've read the entire Pliocene Exile saga 4 times, which speaks greatly to the regard that I hold for Julian May.

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posted by OHenryPacey at 5:41 PM on October 21, 2017


I discovered "The Many Colored Land" as a 13-year-old at my small-town library in Oregon, and promptly devoured everything I could find by her. Decades went by, and I found the Galactic Milieu series of hers, I think it was at St Marks Books. I tore through that series as well. Time for a re-read of the Pliocene books.

RIP, Ms. May.

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posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:10 PM on October 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


My library had the first of the Pliocene Exile books and a prequel to the Galactic Milieu, but I could never find any more of her books as a kid. I picked up a couple at a used book store a couple years ago but haven't got around to reading them. (And I still don't have a full set.)

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posted by eruonna at 6:31 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by Lesser Spotted Potoroo at 7:12 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by triage_lazarus at 7:17 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by Nancy_LockIsLit_Palmer at 7:43 PM on October 21, 2017


Well. nuts. Pliocene Exile is one of my all time favorite series, with the assorted Milieu books a nice support to it, even if I don't care for them as much. I occasionally cite a bit from Richard in the first book when teaching astronomy.

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posted by Four Ds at 9:53 PM on October 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


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posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:06 PM on October 21, 2017


Another who read the Pliocene/Milieu series, it really changed my worldview.

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posted by Sphinx at 10:21 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by zaelic at 10:31 PM on October 21, 2017


I didn't realize until just now that Julian May was a woman. I just looked at The Many Colored Land recently and thought I needed check it out for the first time in many years.

RIP.
posted by bongo_x at 11:20 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 11:55 PM on October 21, 2017


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posted by filtergik at 3:24 AM on October 22, 2017


Holy shit the premise of the Pliocene Exile series sounds both bonkers and awesome. Thanks for this post, Wobbuffet.
posted by mediareport at 4:41 AM on October 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Years ago, I had a friend who hated The Many Colored Land and would bad mouth it regularly for reasons I do not recall. The series looked kind of interesting to me, but I never quite got around to reading it. I lost touch with that friend after we both moved, but last year I discovered his name popping up on some whacko right wing discussion boards. He was full in the grip of Fox Derangement Syndrome. Seeing that development and remembering his hatred for for the books, makes me want to read them more than ever. Off to Amazon....
posted by maurice at 8:24 AM on October 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


I read the first two books of the Galactic Milieu series before I ever even heard of the Saga of Pliocene Exile. If you haven't read any of them yet, I heartily recommend them, and I actually recommend reading them in the same order I did. Without spoiling anything, it makes the connections between some of the characters in the two series that much more surprising.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:09 AM on October 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


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posted by runehog at 11:17 AM on October 22, 2017


It's totally not bonkers, mediareport. It is a piece of well-researched and yet aggressive and innovative SF world-building that is on par with Frank Herbert and the best of Larry Niven. That is also has a very nice frisson of fantasy-with-your-science-fiction, very reminiscent of Anne McCaffrey's earlier and better Pern books, doesn't hurt that. It comes together very nicely and has a lot fewer holes in than you might expect.

Of course what people really love about the books is not only does it start with an absolute blockbuster of SFnal/fantastic world building, it deploys what for SF is an exceptional depth of feeling for characters and the variety of human (and human-like aliens, of course) motivation and experience. Maybe a typical nerd in his 30s could have written this, but the fact that it actually was written by worldly women in her late 40s with three kids and a successful career outside of SF really shines through to me. I felt it vaguely reading the Exile series for the first time as a standard 15 year old SF reader but boy does it come through in contrast with typical SF product when I re-read them as a 40 year old Wall Street guy with a wife, kids and all the trimmings.
posted by MattD at 12:35 PM on October 22, 2017 [5 favorites]


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posted by the sobsister at 2:16 PM on October 22, 2017


I have read the Pliocene Epic and the Galactic Milieu books a few times each. SO GOOD.

So many small details remain with me years later. The spaceship died! The super-advanced aliens are fighty assholes! Could these people all get any more venal?!

Thanks for so many crazy notions!
posted by wenestvedt at 3:35 PM on October 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Holy shit the premise of the Pliocene Exile series sounds both bonkers and awesome. Thanks for this post, Wobbuffet.

It is absolutely fucking bonkers and awesome.

It's totally not bonkers, mediareport. It is a piece of well-researched and yet aggressive and innovative SF world-building that is on par with Frank Herbert and the best of Larry Niven. That is also has a very nice frisson of fantasy-with-your-science-fiction, very reminiscent of Anne McCaffrey's earlier and better Pern books, doesn't hurt that. It comes together very nicely and has a lot fewer holes in than you might expect.

All of these things are true. It commits with absolute intensity to its 'what if everything in celtic mythology and everything Jung ever doodled on a napkin was true?' premise, adds laser guns, space elves, the biggest football brawl in all of megahistory and superpsychics in glowing colour coded armour, then wraps the whole thing in a formally perfect time loop. The prose is serviceable to good, the characters are strong (helped by all the mythic archetypes she very deliberately uses) and the pageturningness is potent.

It's totally goddam deranged. But it works.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:35 PM on October 22, 2017 [8 favorites]


Welp there I go thinking I've read most all the great space/SF operas out there and then the death of an artist (ain't it always the way?) makes me take notice of yet another few series and trove of books. I'm jealous of all you saying you read this at 13; I'll be tackling them now, when I'm way way way past that, but the 13-year-old in me is still strong, so I'm looking forward to it.
posted by zardoz at 3:50 PM on October 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


Be aware there's a certain amount of tastefully conveyed space elf rape camps, magical powerstealing rape murder and power-unlocking rape torture.

It was the '80s.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:54 PM on October 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


*Everyone looks downward, acknowledging the books’ flaws and wishing they didn’t put such a stain on the corpus*
posted by wenestvedt at 7:42 PM on October 22, 2017


A few more reactions:

At James Nicoll's Dreamwidth journal, 12 comments.

Natalie Luhrs (@eilatan): "These books are--bananapants is the best way to describe them. I love them ..."

Tom (@attentive): "'ethnic world, a planet of the Human Polity settled by a single ethnic group ...'"

Forbidden Planet (@ForbiddenPlanet): "Fantastic picture taken during her FP signing for 'The Adversary'"
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:20 PM on October 22, 2017


Also, an interesting footnote about Black Trillium.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:28 PM on October 22, 2017


Oh and another point, the protagonists are all effectively cosplayers.
posted by Sebmojo at 9:50 PM on October 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


Featured obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:40 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


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