Julian May
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Julian May (b. 1931) is a science fiction writer, best known for her Saga of Pliocene Exile (British series title, Saga of the Exiles) and Galactic Milieu books. She grew up in Chicago, and became involved in science fiction fandom in her late teens. She sold her first professional fiction, a short story called "Dune Roller", in 1951 to John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. She met her future husband, Ted Dikty, later that year when he requested permission to reprint the story in his anthology series; they were married in 1952. She chaired the Tenth World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago that same year. After selling one more short story, "Star of Wonder" (to Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1953), she dropped out of the science fiction field.
During the 1950s, May wrote thousands of science articles for the World Book encyclopedia. In 1957 she and her husband founded a production and editorial service for small publishers, specializing in children's non-fiction. Between 1957 and 1981 she wrote more than one hundred books for children and young adults, all non-fiction, under her own names and a variety of pseudonyms.
In 1981 she returned to science fiction with the Saga of Pliocene Exile, published in the U.S. by Houghton Mifflin. The Saga tells the adventures of a group of late twenty-first-century time travelers who pass through a one-way time machine into the Pliocene epoch, expecting a pre-technological paradise only to find that the Earth is already occupied by a race of humanoid aliens from another galaxy.
In 1987 she published Intervention in the U.K. followed by the Milieu Trilogy - 'Jack the Bodiless', 'Diamond Mask' and 'Magnificat'. These four books describe human mental development as it becomes 'operant', or telepathic/telekinetic, and how the five races of the Galactic Milieu intervene in order to police this development. However, many humans are opposed to this intervention and a group of operants stage a rebellion. They are defeated by other humans and the other races of the Galactic Milieu and are forced to travel through the one-way time machine described in the Saga of Pliocene Exile. One of the rebels meets and falls in love with another 'operant' time-traveler and they travel to a distant star system in the Pliocene epoch to become the 'operant parents' of the first Galactic Milieu race - the Lylmiks. The Lylmiks then appear, epochs later, in the Intervention - Milieu series.
See Also
References
- Julian May, A Pliocene Companion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), pp. 181-207. ISBN 0-395-36516-3.