2014 read #45: The Golden Torc by Julian May.

The Golden Torc by Julian May
381 pages
Published 1982
Read from May 10 to May 18
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I put this book aside in disgust after a one-two punch of shocking transphobia and paleontological inaccuracy. The transphobia, alas, was nothing surprising given the date Torc was published -- second generation feminism was still the going concern, so of course the one transsexual character would be the woman who betrays all of womankind, undoing the surgical infertility required of all time-traveling women and opening them to the depredations and rape of the alien breeding program, and of course she would be bonkers on top of all that. Not surprising, as I said, but tremendously disappointing and off-putting. In the very next chapter, May -- who had been fairly restrained and conscientious in her Pliocene fauna until this point -- suddenly has plesiosaurs swimming the Atlantic, some sixty million years after their extinction. The paleontological errata aren't in the same category of distasteful as the trans* hate, but after those two chapters I tossed Torc in favor of Boy, Snow, Bird. And... welp.

If one were inclined to overlook those things and focus on Torc as a pulp adventure of psychics, faries, and time-travel, it still comes up a bit wanting. (This book is literally as old as I am, so I doubt anyone cares about spoilers at this point, but just in case, here's your warning: Spoilers ahead.) Every one of my favorite characters in the series snuffs it in Torc -- Madame Guderian, Claude the paleontologist, and Bryan the love-lorn anthropologist. Every other human character is either a racial stereotype or a prickly, annoying snit, and the three operant psychics are far too damn superpowered for me to feel much concern for them in any case. Even with the understanding that the Tanu and Firvulag are meant to be Faery, the alien races are still kind of silly. But I do like that, after the too-easy victory at the end of The Many-Colored Land, things don't go well for our protagonists, and while I don't know why I should keep reading now that all my favorite characters are dead, I do like that main characters die in this series. I had my doubts after Land.

One thing that still has me hooked is the setting itself -- I always was a sucker for deep-time narratives, even if the occasional anachronistic plesiosaur swims up. (Maybe there's a whole parallel plotline going on under the waves, with an intelligent race of plesiosaurs building a time-portal of their own to explore the far-future.) After accidentally getting an eyeful of spoilers for the rest of the series on Wiki, I have a feeling that the setting will get less engrossing in future volumes, but eh. I made it through the Prospero's Children trilogy, I can make it through just about any initially promising but ultimately disappointing series.