If you've been reading SF/fantasy since the early eighties, then you must be familiar with the Saga of the Exiles. What did happen to those books? Everyone had at least one. They were turning up in junk shops for years, you saw them everywhere, people were always reading them at school, on the tube, in their lunch hour. A fact which makes the lack of coverage of Magnificat all the curiouser. Maybe when you keep people waiting this long you lose their attention? Whatever, as far as I'm concerned, anyone that tells a story as well as Julian May does with these deserves our indulgence.

Julian May has been a devotee of science fiction for a long time, and it shows. The Galactic Milieu Trilogy and its prequel Intervention, and kind of sequel The Saga of the Exiles, is, in many ways, an old-fashioned SF epic, a semi-space opera/future history of Earth's premier metapsychic (possessed of higher mental powers of which telepathy is only the beginning) family, the Remillards. Spanning 170 years, from the birth of the books' narrator, Rogatien Remillard, it's a good vs evil saga with fallible, powerful-vulnerable heroes and transcendent, redeemable, even heroic villains, finally curving back to the Pliocene quartet containing the redemption of the principal villain Marc. There are no one dimensional characters. Even those with walk-on parts are drawn in detailed, data-filled but human blocks of prose. Lumps of scientific and future-historical data are downloaded in a similar manner. In any other writer this would be a weakness, but not with May -- every unusual story-telling trick works to near perfection. The one real weakness is a big one, smack in the middle of the plot of the Milieu Trilogy -- we all know who the multiple personality with the subconscious, psychotic alter ego is almost right away, it's so obvious -- but the characterisation and riffs on psychology and politics are so good we can ignore it. The good-evil struggle reaches its purest expression in the conflict between the brothers Jack and Marc, a conflict foreshadowed and echoed many times throughout Intervention-Milieu.

A sprawling escapist saga in the tradition of the Lensman series, the Foundation books... only a million times more literary, as they'd have to be -- I for one don't much care for space opera or straight SF. Magnificat is a positive literary pleasure, in fact, full of quotations and echoes, character, passion and resonance -- and relevant. Impossible to do more than scratch upon it in a short review such as this. It lacks the aridity of the old hard SF too. Entertains and informs. Derivative, but you could call this a synthesis of a tradition as much as its part of one, with ideas of its own on top. Accomplished cookery.