The Many-Colored Land

The Many-Colored Land is a science fiction novel by the American writer Julian May, published in 1981. It is the first book of the Saga of Pliocene Exile, known in Britain and the Commonwealth as the Saga of the Exiles.

The story begins with a discovery: a one-way gate has been found that leads to Earth six million years in the past, and the advanced society of the Galactic Milieu decides to let it operate rather than close it. Its purpose is to provide an outlet for citizens who do not fit: criminals, the malformed, the violent, the merely unhappy, all of them encouraged to emigrate permanently into the prehistoric world. The novel follows a group of these exiles as they pass through the gate, each with a private reason for going and no prospect of return. What they find on the other side is not an empty world, and the talents that made them unsuitable at home turn out to be useful in a landscape governed by powers they know nothing about.

May mixes hard science fiction with Celtic myth and writes the series as a long adventure in which the exiles' personal disappointments drive the plot.