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Title: Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy, No 3)
ISBN: 0345362497
Author:
Julian May
Publicate Date: 1997-06-29
Publish: 1997-06-29
List Price: $6.99
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Mass Market Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $29.46
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $10.99
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1: Super Reader
Marc Remillard is a fully committed rebel now, and has his own plans
for humanity. His Mental Man is a huge brain, with fully harnessed
mental powers and no bodily weaknesses. He ties into the xenophobia of
the rebels, using his plans to make humans the most powerful operants
in the galaxy to fuel their desire to help him. He develops
technological aids to their power to try and help offset their
numerical disadvantage, when opposed by the pro-Unity operant faction.
Marc's big problem is that the pro-Unity forces are led by his
brother Jack, and his with Dorothea, both of whom are more powerful
than he is.
This ends in an exciting climactic battle of mental superpower and technological weaponry.
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2: Kids, Don't Do Drugs, or Why I Hate Acid-Trip Fiction
_____At this moment, my sight is hazed over with anger. It is over this atrociously written piece of psychedelia that passes itself off as a "novel." A person just wonders how in Hell this almost unreadable piece of distorted drivel was ever published. It barely has a plot. It is barely coherent, mostly incoherent, mostly incomprehensible to but the most ardent (and perhaps slightly stoned) science fiction fanatic. It is so twisted and wrong in so many ways. So how does Magnificat ever get onto library and bookstore shelves? Magnificat is an atrocious travesty of writing that ought not even exist.
_____Let me begin with the barely present plot--which often gets lost in the constant succession of parties, alcohol-consumption and fornication that the main characters seem to immerse themselves in most of the time. The plot of Magnificat somewhat seems to be about a group of fornicating, hedonistic alcoholics with mental superpowers and their various half-witted attempts--so to speak--at saving humanity. Namely, it is their miserable, random and often-failed attempts at using their mental superpowers, their laboratories (failures), their diplomacy (more failure), and--finally--their Star Trek-styled star fleet to occasionally stave off the alien communists. (In fact, some of the characters actually have what are explicitly identified as "star fleet" uniforms.) And when they are not making their random, occasional attempts at saving humanity, they spend most of their time hopping from one socialite venue to another, drinking gallons of wine, eating tons of traditional cuisine and having telepathically enhanced sex with friends and close relatives. Oh yes, the protagonists are also occasionally attacked by a telepathic vampire demon-thing known as the Hydra. But the characters spend so many chapters socializing and drinking and screwing that one only barely even understands this. In short, the plot is lost in the sauce.
_____Speaking of mind-altering substances, this inevitably leads to the LSD-inspired writing style. Descriptions of actions taken by characters are lost in swirls of descriptions around colors and sounds. For example, there is this little gem of literary psychosis on page 212:
...
The metaconcert song fell into a monotonous eight-note loop without the earlier variations and polyphony that had given it beauty. Like the contracting cage of light, it had become an instrument of torture, thudding like the relentless blows of a hammer, louder and louder. I seemed to hear the two captive personae screaming, each one fighting for its life, each one suffering unspeakable pain and terror. I sau the merciless cage squeeze the binary star, forcing the madly throbbing components towards conjunction, toward integration. The concussive song of the metaconcert reaching a roaring crescendo...
...
Now imagine that for just about several hundred pages. Color me amazed--with a Daily Show-styled look of shock and awe on my face. That paragraph alone was worth a second or third read just to prise out the metaphors--and is also typical of the narrative that spews forth on the pages. What is actually happening, and what is hallucination? Where's the beef? Don't ask, because the writing style isn't telling.
_____The characters are no better, mangling English and occasional French in their own ways. When the characters speak, they are so steeped in pseudo-scientific techno-language and quasi-Jungian jargon that the reader must either slow down to a snail's pace in reading or go back to re-read what the Hell just happened. Then there are their language issues. The characters and the narrative both hop into Canadian French at random--no italics or anything. Et porquoi est-ce que l'auteur ecrit en francais quelquefois? Peut-etre, c'est l'haute couture! This goes in addition to how this book's narrative and characters hop from first person to third person between chapters, after chapters, whenever and whatever. If a college professor sat down at the keyboard with an acid tab on the tongue and a half-consumed bottle of Chardonnay within easy reach, writing style similar to what is in this book would be the result. Thank God that the 60's are over--even if the acid-heads are still around and getting their manuscripts published.
_____This book-length piece of acid-trip fiction is just so wrong on so many levels that it will not only never see best-seller lists, but it will just as easily drop off into anonymous oblivion as just another piece of drivel that gets published just because the writer was published before. Look, the writing style is steeped in jargon and psychedelia. As for the characters, they are full of alcohol and full of themselves, not even making sense half the time and sounding like acid trippers the other half of the time. As for the heart and core of the ultra-generic clich?? plot of alien takeover, it is barely present--so lost in flights of literary synthetic psychosis and swirling colors. I wonder what the publishers were licking, snorting or drinking when they let this thing go to press.
_____Now... Is it any wonder why MAGNIFICAT sells for less than two beans? Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I said before that you would only hear my mouth or my fingers whenever I ran into truly bad books. There is a lot of good science fiction, horror and fantasy out there to read--the most powerful genres in Western literature since Shakespeare wrote his plays of prophecies, witches, ghosts, and drug-induced suspended animation. But it seems as if too many established writers are getting away with writing crap. Too many "award-winning" science fiction writers are writing barely legible, generic tales that span hundreds of pages and are doomed to obscurity and unreadability. (Wait, is unreadability a word? It is now!) C.J. Cherryh, Julian May, Kage Baker, and more are all members of this hippie-styled pantheon of psychedelic, acid-trip fiction that almost nobody really buys or reads--almost never making best-seller lists or selling well. Yet some way, some how, those jokers keep getting published, just like how the cinematic phenomenon Uwe Boll keeps making those crap-tacular bad movies based on video games and having them flop at the movie-houses. What Magnificat says to me is that bad books get published all the time and will keep getting published--probably due to the continuing mind-altering effects of drugs taken during the 1960s and 1970s. Most of that stuff will mess up your brain forever; just ask Marv. Kids, don't do drugs, and don't read Julian May.
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3: The Ending is the Best
Well, I think that "Magnificat" is best of the three books in the Galactic Milieu Trilogy. It starts off fairly slowly, with yet more piecemeal attacks by Fury and the last two members of Hydra. Thes are frankly boring and feature yet bore blunders and tired plot devices ("Rogi, I could kill you know but I'd rather torture you for a while first...) Things pick up in the second half when the metaphysic rebellion finally begins in earnest. The centerpiece of this part of the story is Marc, who is undeniably one of the "best" villains in all of science fiction. In this book all of his actions are clear consequences of the things that happened earlier in his life--family conflicts, messy psychological influences and xenophobia--and yet Marc is still a chilling villain. He's single-minded, not gratuitously cruel, but rather focused on his wants to the total exclusion of caring about anyone else.
As with most of May's books, the details stand out more than the big plot. Among her riskiest decisions, May decided to write the first sex scene between Jack and Diamond. It was a gamble, but she pulls it off in style. Getting more "local color" about life on Caledonia and other planets is an added treat; the book could have benefited from more of that. In the end, of course, this book can't work unless the ending really holds up. On that count, there are pluses and minuses. The ending is too short, both the actual action and the final winding-down after the fact. But it is intense while it lasts.
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4: Comes 'Round Full Circle
The Galactic Milieu trilogy was an amazing series and a worthy successor to the Saga of Pliocene Exile and Intervention. Magnificat is the culmination of all the previous works, and is the story of the rise and fall of Marc Remillard. Like one of the other reviewers, I found Marc to be one of the most complex and intriguing characters I've ever read about. He is the Angel of the Abyss and destroyed billions of lives. And courtesy of the wonders of time travel, he is simultaneously Atoning Unifex, the oldest and wisest of the Lylmik, who six million years too late realizes his sin but cannot intervene to stop it.
Marc is truly a creature of opposites. As Unifex, he dances with his young cousin Addie because he finally understands love. As Marc, he ruthlessly tries to sacrifice his own children to his scientific dream. But even in the Pliocene Exile saga, there are hints of redemption as Marc himself activates the time gate to send the kids back home. And in Unifex we still see hints of the old Marc as he coerces Uncle Rogi into doing his bidding. (As an aside, the last line of Intervention, "Goodnight, Marc", was one of the only lines ever to completely blindside me.)
Magnificat draws to a close the stories of Rogi, Denis, Fury and the Hydras, explains the Mental Man project, and finally depicts the dreaded Metapsychic Rebellion only alluded to in previous volumes. We are also given tantalizing glimpses into the fates of Hagen, Cloud, and Kuhal as they try to live out their lives in the Milieu. For the most part, Ms. May does an excellent job tying together all of the loose threads. However, I do have some gripes. Primarily, I was disappointed because the book seemed to rush through some very important events. Since we've been hearing about the rebellion for 8 books now, it would have been nice to see it fleshed out a little. The same with Mental Man and the science of metaconcert development. This is really the first time we've ever seen a description of a metaconcert, and the first time we really learn what Mental Man is. Both are alluded to during the previous books, but they are dealt with much too quickly in the final volume.
This is not to say I didn't enjoy the book. I loved it. But it would have been even better if it had been longer.
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5: Rushed, Tired and wholly Disappointing
Ah well, I guess this is what happens when you're a writer and get bored with your project. And it's such a shame as this whole series started superbly with the intervention books, but it just peters out into a very damp squib.
As mentioned before, the continuity between the saga and this series is poor in the extreme but what galls me about this book (and the previous) is the repetition and the constant running over of events in previous books. It's just aimless filling to pad out what is an already shortened book, when what should have been done is more character building on Marcs character and the Mental Man project, more time in filling in the many gaps that have been left and better handling of scenes that could have been so much better. Eg Rogi and Parnells meeting - how can he on one hand be so easily mastered by Marcs coercion at the wedding and the next able to comfortably overide any compulsion Parnell may have over him and have time to do the whole out spiral thing?
It's sadly like she has run out of ideas, or simply didn't have the juices left to finish off the project which is such a shame. Maybe she should have given it a few years more and had a break and come back to it refreshed.
Buy it to complete the series, and to see how it all started - but don't build your hopes up too much.
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