2015 read #23: Jack the Bodiless by Julian May.

Jack the Bodiless by Julian May
464 pages
Published 1991
Read from May 2 to May 13
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Contains spoilers for the Saga of Pliocene Exile (1, 2, 3, 4) and Intervention.

Expectation: Jack the Bodiless is the first volume in a trilogy depicting humanity's Metapsychic Rebellion against the power and dominion of the Galactic Milieu, a saga of space war and psychokinetic conflict hinted at in May's Saga of Pliocene Exile. May sketched the happy and prosperous Milieu after the resolution of the Rebellion in the early pages of The Many-Colored Land, and introduced the Remillards and "the Adversary," Marc Remillard, in the final two volumes, so before we even begin this new trilogy, we know the resolution of the major plot threads (Saint Jack the Bodiless saves Galactic Unity but gives his life in the process; Marc Remillard and his inner circle go into Pliocene exile, where "the Adversary" is eventually redeemed, and in a fit of starry-eyed idealism, psychically projects himself into a neighboring galaxy, where five million years later he will emerge as Atoning Unifex, the "Family Ghost" of the Remillards who nudges events into their "necessary" course). But May surprised me in Intervention with her ability to keep me invested in a story whose major beats I already know, even in spite of an unnecessary and uninteresting subplot about psychotic psychic serial killers. So I went into Jack the Bodiless expecting a rousing tale of conflict and idealism and massively overpowered psychic titans battling across the arm of the galaxy.

Reality: Jack the Bodiless pretty much blows.

The first sign of trouble comes with the sketchy political and gendered implications of the opening plot. During the Saga, I noticed May's tendency to assign her female characters subservient or supportive roles: as I noted in my review of The Adversary, "[A]fter all the troubling gender politics in the previous volumes, perhaps it's no surprise that the central conflict is resolved when a powerful female protagonist finally, contentedly relinquishes control and assumes a subsidiary role to a more powerful male." The first 300 pages of Jack the Bodiless depict a woman, irrationally driven to save her dying marriage, becoming pregnant in defiance of a Galactic statute designed to weed harmful alleles out of the human breeding pool. That could be read as a defense of reproductive self-determination -- except Teresa becomes essentially passive after getting pregnant, and her 13 year old son Marc is the one who organizes and effects her escape from Milieu justice. Her unborn fetus is of course Jack, the super-psychic galactic savior, and he and Teresa have in utero dialogues about Christianity and the necessity for a loving creator god to become incarnate and push humanity toward a Teilhardian Omega Point. Plenty of sci-fi books have taken Tielhard and the Omega Point for inspiration, but May might be the first in my experience to explicitly declare Christianity "true" in her story universe.

These gender and ideological issues are exacerbated by the in-universe racial implications of the events of the Saga of Pliocene Exile. At the end of those books, the metapsychic potential of the hominid genepool is augmented and accelerated by cross-breeding with psychic faeries from another galaxy (it's a long story). But those faeries settled Pliocene Europe, and continued mating with "Celtic" humans into the dawn of history, so Western Europeans far surpass the other human "races" in metapsychic development by the time Jack the Bodiless begins. One might even say that Western Europeans, in this story universe, represent a sort of master race of psychic operants. That may have been matter-of-course for sci-fi when The Many-Colored Land was first printed in 1981, but even by 1991 it had to have looked awkward, and here in 2015 it's downright odious.

Plenty of sci-fi books can still be entertaining despite despicable racial and gender ideology -- I mean, that encompasses practically every sci-fi book published before 1980, and most of them afterward. Where Jack the Bodiless truly fails is its lack of entertainment. Like so many genre books from the '80s and '90s, including Intervention, Jack wastes time with a superfluous and shoehorned "psycho killer" plotline. I guess a tale of galactic strife and a clash of metapsychic titans isn't enough to sustain a trilogy, so all that gets shuffled off to the ensuing volumes while the Remillards investigate a psychic serial killer. And once the pointless mystery of the psycho killers (five kids operating in metaconcert, because of course the only thing more '80s and '90s than an extraneous serial killer is a bunch of killer children) is resolved, the four surviving killers go into hiding, and the narrator promises to address their denouement in the next book, so we aren't even finished with this ridiculous nonsense.

Speaking of unresolved plotlines, Teresa and Intervention narrator Rogi Remillard hide from the Galactic authorities during her pregnancy in a Bigfoot preserve in British Columbia. No real reason for it -- just "Hey, have some Bigfeet while this story spins its wheels." Unless this is a long range Chekhov's Bigfoot, to be resolved in some ensuing volume, nothing whatsoever happens with the Bigfoot storyline. They exist as mere set dressing.

There is just enough here -- just barely enough -- to keep me from despising Jack outright, and just barely enough of interest to keep me going into the next book of the trilogy. Perhaps this is merely a series low point, a bunch of dull table-setting that should have taken only a hundred or so pages, sort of like the Saga low point, The Nonborn King. Let's hope Diamond Mask has more momentum and less extraneous garbage -- though if narrator Rogi is to be believed, we won't even get to the Metapsychic Rebellion until the final book of the trilogy.