Nothing is explained at all, nothing is given to you as a reader. If you want a writer that shows and doesn’t tell, Julian May might be the writer for you. Not to mention that each scenario is confusing in and of itself. While I admire the set up, it just didn’t work for me, this bouncing around from one thing to another. I think for me the characters are the most important part of any story and without enough time to settle into any one character, there just wasn’t time for me to form a connection with any them at all. By the time these stories are connected together I’d spent a lot of time not being interested in any one of the characters.

This keeps going on and on and on right from the start. There are probably half a dozen or more scenes, one after the other, all seemingly non-related that introduce us to new characters. First off, the story takes way too long to get going. I think it’s a case of this book was not for me. It opens up a whole world of wonder, not in far-flung galaxies but in our own distant past on Earth–a world that will captivate not only science-fiction and fantasy fans but also those who enjoy literate thrillers. Thus begins this dazzling fantasy novel that invites comparisons with the work of J.R.R. In 2110, a particularly strange and interesting group was preparing to make the journey–a starship captain, a girl athlete, a paleontologist, a woman priest, and others who had reason to flee the technological perfection of twenty-second-century life. The misfits and mavericks of the future–many of them brilliant people–began to seek this exit door to a mysterious past. But, as time went on, a certain usefulness developed. In the year 2034, Theo Quderian, a French physicist, made an amusing but impractical discovery: the means to use a one-way, fixed-focus time warp that opened into a place in the Rhone River valley during the idyllic Pliocene Epoch, six million years ago.

The many colored land