Review date: 16/10/98
Publisher: Pan
Published: 1984
In the final book of the Pleistocene series, the rebel metapsychic Marc Remeillard plays a large part; the title of the novel itself is one of his nicknames. His children, and the others of their generation, inhabiting the small settlement set up by the rebels, have gone to Europe, with the intention of setting up a copy of the time gate at the Pleistocene end so that they can return to the future. They were too young to have been involved in the rebellion, and hope for acceptance by the Concilium which rules the human polity.
Marc, however, has his own plans for them The roots of his disagreement with the Concilium were his plans for Mental Man, an entity purely of the mind. He wanted to accelerate human evolution to acheive this, using his own genes as a basis (as a member of the strongest human family of metapsychics, with a unique gene giving self-rejuvination, he was a not unreasonable choice). But the death of his wife in the fighting occasioned by his refusal to accept the Concilium decision to discontinue his research led to a psychological infertility (his germ plasm no longer appeared to be fertile). Thus his plans relied on the availability of germ plasm from his children, hence his determination not to let them travel six million years into the future. He has been unable to bring himself to tell them, partly because he doesn't know what he would do in case of refusal, and partly because he hopes he himself might recover.
Naturally, the various factions with political interest in the Many-Coloured Land all wish to explot this scenario for their own ends. This provides the main interest of the novel.
One of May's main reasons for writing the third and fourth novels in the series is to provide a far closer integration with the novels about the Galactic Milieu and the way that the human polity took its place within it. All the events from these books (from Intervention to Magnificat) take place earlier in the personal timelines of the rebels, though they were published later. I cannot remember what it was like to read the Pleistocene novels without the benefit of the Milieu novel's clarifications, but I suspect it was rather confusing. Certainly, the first two Pleistocene novels, The Many-Coloured Land and The Golden Torc, stand up best as self-contained works. They do however create a desire to finish the series as a whole, and to this The Adversary provides a fitting conclusion.
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