Intervention

Intervention is a science fiction novel by Julian May, published in 1987. Its frame is the long wait of the Galactic Milieu, whose five races have watched Earth for sixty thousand years for the moment when human mental development would be ready for what they call the Intervention.

That moment arrives as the twentieth century draws to its end, when operants across the planet begin to display extraordinary abilities. They can speak to one another telepathically, build mental shields and exercise coercion by power of mind, which changes what human beings are able to do to one another and to themselves.

The chronicle is built from the memories of Rogatien Remillard, a dealer in secondhand books whose account is written a century after the events it describes. It is the world he remembers that forms the core of the book, and the distance between the telling and the events is part of how the story is assembled.

The book begins a longer sequence about the Milieu and about the Remillard family who become central to it, and it sets out the operant abilities that the later books build upon. Rogi's memory is the thread that holds the whole account together.