The Galactic Milieu Series by Julian May describes the struggle of the most powerful of the human metapsychics and their interaction with a galactic confederation of exotic beings.
The entire story takes place over roughly a 150 year period, starting with the birth of the narrator in 1945. History starts to diverge wildly and obviously from ours in the mid 80s as psychic research becomes mainstream due to the actual existence of people with operant mind powers.
- Intervention
- Jack The Bodiless
- Diamond Mask
- Magnificat
The series is tightly linked to the Saga of the Exiles by the same author.
The Galactic Milieu provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents:
- Fury is a split personality formed when Denis was abused by his father as a baby.
- Fury itself probably counts for its treatment of Hydra and its intentions for the nonborn Paramounts.
- The Ageless: The Remillard Clan. Each one appears to stop getting older at a different age.
- A God Am I: Mental Man is repeatedly referred to using capitalized pronouns, like the Judeo-Christian God.
- Artificial Human: The "nonborn" are artificially inseminated, then grown and delivered to term in Uterine Replicators.
- Artistic License – Biology: Evolutionary Levels towards the "goal" of Unity.
- Assimilation Plot: Metapsychic humanity is to be evolved to "coadunation," in essence an altruistic racial unity, though not a Hive Mind. Ordinary humans without operant abilities are allowed to remain separate so long as they don't become recidivist criminals, though the definition of "crime" is continually adjusted downward; those who won't get with the program are exiled, imprisoned, lobotomized or euthanized (and exile later stops being an option), and nonpsychic humanity is being slowly bred out. Operants are brought into coadunation, period; after the end of the Metapsychic Rebellion, there's no option B except for Rogatien Remillard, who is allowed to remain the last Metapsychic Rebel in exchange for services rendered (and one last service).
- Aliens Are Bastards: ...and Are Trying to Assimilate Our Race into a Hive Mind in Which We Will Lose All Our Individuality — The Rebels believe this.
- Arranged Marriage: Denis and Lucille marry because they know their offspring will be very powerful metapsychics; they don't actually like each other much at the time. It works out though.
- The Atoner: Marc Remillard, who goes through the Pliocene time-gate after the Rebellion, and eventually guides the Duat Galaxy into Unity and founds the Galactic Milieu, becoming a Lylmik, and naming himself Atoning Unifex. In Magnificat, after six million years, he says to the other four Supervisors that his atonement is still incomplete, although they don't appear to know what he means as they constantly ask him how he comes across all his information.
- Badass Biker: Young Marc rides a Cool Bike during his college days.
- Badass Family: The Remillard family rarely ever work together as a whole, but they're all pretty badass.
- Benevolent Alien Invasion: Whether this trope is in effect provides one of the central conflicts of the series. The Intervention almost indisputably saved humanity from destruction through civil war, but the majority of humanity is simply not on board with the creation of Unity, and are still bitter about the Simbiari taking over and suppressing their freedom of speech, assembly and religion for several decades.
- Big Bad Ensemble: There are two separate threats. One is Fury, who is Denis' split personality and is largely out to wreck things, particularly the Remillard dynasty. The other is Marc Remillard, leader of the Metapsychic Rebellion and creator of Mental Man, who is out to prevent the forcible coadunation of humanity by any means necessary.
- Big Good: Atoning Unifex, who created the Milieu and guided it to its present state. Meaning Marc Remillard is arguably the Big Good and the Big Bad.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Remillards. Most of them are good guys, but their internal problems drive virtually the entire plot. By the end of 'Magnificat', Marc can be said to be responsible for the death of a whole lot of family members. Four siblings: Matthieu, Maddy, Jack, Cyndia. On the executive focus team, who die at the end of the Rebellion, are his uncles Severin and Adrien, his aunt Catherine, and his theoretical father-in-law, Rory Muldowney. And on Jack's side are Paul and Dorothea, his father and his sister-in-law.
- Bittersweet Ending: Fury and Hydra are dead, but so is Denis, and the best and brightest of the Remillard family with him. Mental Man has been destroyed, and Marc rendered infertile and sent into Exile. The Rebellion is broken, and humanity will survive and achieve its destiny, but that means that all of metapsychic humanity will be forced into coadunation whether they like it or not, except for Rogi, while nonpsychic humanity will be imprisoned or killed if they won't get with the program, or else left to slowly die out.
- Brain Monster: A rare positive example: Jack Remillard's unique genetic makeup leads to cancer destroying his entire body except his brain. His metapsychic abilities are so powerful that he can create a perfect illusion of having a body, but it's only an illusion. When he drops the illusion, he's just a disembodied brain - hence his epithet of "Jack the Bodiless".
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Jack to Diamond on their first wedding anniversary: "You change into something comfortable. I'll put away your flask of algiprote purée and set the table and grow a digestive tract."
- Bridal Carry: Jack carries Dorothée out of the deep-driller like this in the end of Diamond Mask. They get married later.
- Brother–Sister Incest:
- Marc Remillard and Cyndia Muldowney, who is his half sister, although neither of them are aware of it at first.
- And artificially with Marc and Madeleine (real brother and sister) in creating the Mental Man babies. And not artificially when Madeleine is in her disguise as Lynelle Rogers.
- Also Twincest with Dierdre and Diarmid Keogh.
- Cain and Abel:
- Rogi and Don in Intervention - Rogi toys with killing his brother after he 'steals' one too many girls from him.
- Denis and Victor are also enemies; Victor tries to kill a large number of operants including Denis at the end of Intervention, and also invades his mind as a split personality Fury on his death in Jack the Bodiless.
- Marc and Jon at the end of the Rebellion go to battle against each other.
- Also prenatal Marc and his twin Matthieu: they were found trying to strangle each other to death in the womb.
- The Casanova: Paul. The darker consequences of his affairs are given a lot of attention.
- Chekhov's Gun: A throwaway line from the first book, that parents are generally immune to their children's psychic powers. This comes back in a big way when the Remillards attempt to exorcise Fury from Denis.
- A Child Shall Lead Them: Quite narrowly averted with Dorothée, who becomes Dirigent of Caledonia at twenty, although the age of majority in the Milieu is sixteen.
- Cliffhanger: At the end of Diamond Mask."And then Anne Remillard spoiled it all by coming into my bookshop and telling me that Denis was Fury."
- Child Prodigy: Marc and Jack, who later become Teen Genii as well. Also Dorothée, who actually refers to herself as this as a five-year-old.
- Cool Mask: Diamond Mask.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Rogi.
- Dartmouth For Everyone - Although justified because the Remillards and Macdonald that go there are all incredibly clever anyway.
- Do Not Adjust Your Set: The start of the Rebellion is broadcast on TV across the galaxy, and every psychic is involved in the end.
- Driven to Suicide: Laura Tremblay eventually realises Paul will never marry her and resorts to this. In a rather Squicky way too. Also, Teresa, who doesn't take young Jack's decomposition well.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Climax of the Metapsychic Rebellion.
- Eccentric Mentor: Rogatien has many flaws, but he reduced Parni to ash at Jack and Diamond's wedding, and he did kill Fury.
- Evilutionary Biologist: Marc Remillard is obsessed with creating a new Human Subspecies of metapsychic paramounts through careful application of eugenics.
- Family Disunion: The Remillards get together for Christmas 2078... and the Dynasty try to exorcise Denis, who is unknowingly Fury.
- Fetus Terrible:
- Jon Remillard being the most obviously powerful, though many characters count including Marc who kills his twin in the womb.
- Hydra were 'seduced' to Fury's agenda in the womb. It is implied that there was a choice involved.
- Mental Man are also fetuses with an extraordinary amount of metapsychic ability.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Jack finds it easier to interact with ordinary humans when he's wearing a human shape.
- Framing Device: The series uses a framing device of an autobiography written by Uncle Rogi, the nail who constantly diverts human history while passing unnoticed.
- Goo-Goo-Godlike: Jack and Marc both have enormous metapsychic power as babies - Marc believes that Jack and Teresa summoned him to Earth in a metaconcert when Jack was a five-month foetus.
- Gratuitous French:
- Many of the Remillards occasionally speak in French, although this is a Justified Trope, as the family has French roots and after the introduction of English as humanity's official language using one's ancestral tongue is said to be very fashionable.
- In the case of Rogi, he was raised speaking French and is really incredibly stubborn.
- Gray-and-Grey Morality: Both the Rebels and the Unity are portrayed as having their good points. Both of them also have some extremely nasty elements to them.
- Green-Eyed Monster:
- Marc becomes steadily more jealous of Jack, thinking that he is a step up in evolution from the rest of humanity, and this is the root of his desire to create more Jacks through Mental Man.
- Hydra is also envious of Fury's preoccupation with Marc which leads Gordo to try to kill him but only kill and expose himself in the process.
- The Hero Dies: Jack and Diamond are both killed at the end of the Rebellion. Although this is obvious once you see their death dates on the family tree. Unifex also dies at the end of Magnificat, again pointed out by the family tree.
- Humans Are Special: A special dispensation is given to humanity to make sure they don't kill themselves before entering galactic society. They then become better at everything than everyone within 70 years of contact.
- Human Subspecies: A sort of metaphorical one. "Homo summus" ("high man") is a reference to humans who have abandoned physical incarnation and exist solely as brains or mental beings. Jack the Bodiless is the first example, but this is also the end goal of the Mental Man project, and the end form of Marc Remillard. The term "homo superior" is also used to refer to operants.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The grey limbo, not to mention the pain barrier required to get there.
- Immortality Begins at Twenty: The Remillards' self-rejuvenating gene kicks in at slightly different ages for them all, but (with the obvious exception of Jack) they do grow to adulthood normally and then just stop aging. Anne's aging is said to have stopped in her early forties.
- Icy Gray Eyes: Marc has gray eyes of the cold and strong-willed variety. Unifex often likes to have gray eyes in the bodies he creates for himself as well.
- Improbable Age: Some of the really powerful humans (Marc, Jack and Dorothée) are admitted to the Concilium at sixteen. This is because they're all extremely powerful paramount metapsychics and mentally far beyond most adults.
- Insufferable Genius: Jack a little, before he learns to be tactful about it.
- Insatiable Newlyweds: Marc takes a few months off Rebel business just after he and Cyndia marry. He doesn't recover until Cyndia tells him she's pregnant.
- In Vino Veritas: Rory Muldowney confronting Paul about Laura's suicide
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night - Start of Jack The Bodiless.
- I Am Not My Father: For several years in his early adult life Marc tries to convince himself he is asexual. One of his main reasons is his disgust at his father's womanising.
- I Have Many Names: Rogi devotes a couple of paragraphs to this for Dorothea Macdonald at the beginning of Diamond Mask: among her names and nicknames are Dee, Dody, Doro, Dodo, Dorrie, Dorothée, and later Diamond, Diamond Mask, and Illusio.
- Kissing Cousins: Adrienne refers to Caroline and Dougie in Jack the Bodiless, and she herself is trying to hide her crush on Marc. Paul and Teresa are cousins, sharing Don as a grandfather. The Hydras, who are all cousins, also have physical affairs with each other once they reach adolescence.
- Little Miss Badass: Fifteen-year-old Dorotheé is trying to hunt down the Hydras.
- The Mafia: Psychic mafia no less. Connor runs this in Intervention.
- The Magocracy: The Concilium is limited to operants.
- Masquerade Ball: In Diamond Mask. Dorothée gatecrashes and uses it as an opportunity to probe Remillards.
- Meaningful Name: Yes, Atoning Unifex is the primary instigator of Unity in two galaxies, and is definitely atoning for something.
- Mirror Match:
- Via a Stable Time Loop through the Saga of the Exiles, Marc Remillard is actually leading both the Galactic Milieu and the Rebellion against it.
- Sampled earlier, when Atoning Unifex quite thoroughly and easily quashes a pubescent Marc Remillard's scheme to steal a starship and escape to where his mother and Rogi are hiding.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Subverted: you'd think "Jack the Bodiless" was a name for a terrifying villain. Actually, Jon's a freakish mutant without a body, but he's also a saint and utterly devoted to the welfare of humanity, even if he's not specifically part of it.
- Nepotism: This is an accepted part of Milieu politics, and the Remillards are often guilty of it, helping each other in their political goals and campaigns.
- Older Than They Look: People are able to be rejuvenated to make themselves look young again. Additionally, many of the Remillards are also self-rejuvenating. Rogi is a hundred and fifty or so at the end of the books but he hasn't aged past his fifties.
- Omniscient Morality License: Atoning Unifex knows what's destined to happen because he lived through it; it's his job to make sure everything that must happen ultimately leads to the coadunation of humanity.
- One Judge to Rule Them All: In Milieu votes, if the fifteen Lylmik exercise their authority (which they try not to do) that overrules all other races. Among the Lylmik, Atoning Unifex has the same power - so basically, if he makes a decision for the Milieu, it overrides the parliamentary mechanisms.
- Our Love Is Different: The more tragic version. Laura Tremblay is convinced that what she and Paul Remillard (the series' resident The Casanova) have is 'special' and that eventually he will marry her. She is eventually told by one of the Lylmik that she is wrong, and Paul will never marry again.
- Physical God: Paramount operants, when equipped with 600x cerebroenergetic enhancers, are capable of wrecking planets with their minds (especially in metaconcert). Even without Marc's tech, though, they're capable of warping reality in their immediate area.
- Power Levels:
- Random numbers thrown in occasionally, but any psychic is given a power grading in each school. Operant, Adept, Master, Grandmaster and Paramount Grandmaster. Guess which race has lots of Paramounts.
- Humanity has six, and only three are officially recognized as such. The Lylmik? Rumor has it, all of them.
- Marc, Jack, and Diamond Mask are officially recognized by the Galactic Milieu as Paramount Grand Master operants. Denis/Fury Is the unofficial fourth, although imperfectly trained and hampered by its dual nature. Mental Man doesn't count, as they were produced artificially and murdered en masse before they were "born". Two more are found in the Pliocene Exile series: Aiken Drum, who is a nonborn MacGregor (and thus part of the extended Remillard-MacGregor-MacDonald clan, on Dorothea's side of the family) and magnified his own capabilities in a unique way; and Felice, who is easily the most powerful operant seen in the combined series, explicitly an entire magnitude more powerful than Marc wearing full 600x cerebroenergetic armor.
- Power Perversion Potential: It's explicitly stated that metapsychic powers are used by many operants to enhance sex, to the point where an encounter between Jack and Diamond Mask is eventually performed purely through metacreative stimulation while Jack is in brain form.
- Psychic Powers: In spades in all the books.
- Race Against Time: Unifex gives Rogi until the end of the year to finish writing his tell-all memoirs. This is because Unifex, whose intervention was implied to be the only reason Rogi has not yet been brought into Unity or even metapsychic coadunation (which if happened prematurely with Rogi would have disastrously revealed everything he knew and witnessed to a Galactic Mind not yet ready for it), will not live past the end of the year, and wanted to make sure that the full story of the Remillards, Warts and All, is finally revealed to the galaxy which is now ready for it.
- Rage Against the Heavens: The books centre around Humanity's place in the already well established Milieu, who at least initially have the power of life and death over the entire human race.
- Really 700 Years Old: The Lylmik, especially Unifex, take the form of relatively young humans on occasion, but are really millions of years old.
- The Reveal:
- At the very end of Intervention, Rogi addresses Atoning Unifex as Marc.
- At the very start of Diamond Mask, Rogi learns that Marc, Atoning Unifex, is dying and will not last past the end of the year.
- There is also a sort of Luke, I Am Your Father moment (although the readers already know) when Rogi announces to Cloud and Hagen that the suspiciously familiar Lylmik is actually their six-million-year old father, still in the process of atoning for his past sins.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Marc Remillard is quite aware that the only way that the Rebels will be allowed to secede from the Milieu is if they win their independence by force of arms, and is willing to wipe out planets and create abominations of mental power in the lab if that's what it takes to get the Milieu to leave humanity alone.
- Royally Screwed Up: The Remillards are humanity's new First Family and have a couple of definitely screwed up individuals - Victor, who tries to blow up three thousand operants, and the Hydras, who commit a series of gruesome murders.
- Satan: Marc Remillard is referred to as both Abaddon and The Angel of the Abyss towards the end of the Rebellion. Also rather curiously inverted in his later incarnation as Atoning Unifex, who resembles God far more than the devil. He goes so far as to remind Rogi that he is not, when asked if he can foresee the time of the latter's death. "Moi, je ne suis pas le bon dieu, j't'assure!"note
- Screaming Birth: Averted when Teresa gives birth to Jack: she's the calmest one there.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: If anyone did object, Atoning Unifex would have squashed them quickly, because the Remillards need to be the leaders of humanity when everything melts down.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!:
- Kieran O'Conner and Victor Remillard make their money by unscrupulous use of their metapsychic powers.
- Despite knowing this financial and manufacturing empire was gained via criminal means that violate the Altruism Ethic that was a required part of Humanity entering the Milieu, no one anywhere seems to have a problem with the Remillard family keeping all of Victor and Keiren's wealth.
- The Slow Path: The functionally-immortal Marc, having been Exiled into the Pliocene and ultimately guiding Duat into Unity, returns to the Milky Way to do the same, eventually becoming Atoning Unifex (see The Atoner above).
- Space Sector: The setting features numbered sectors; thus, the planet Assawompset is Planet 4 of the star Landa (Star 14-893-042) in Sector 14.
- Squishy Wizard: Even powerful human operants are vulnerable when exhausted or off their guard.
- Stable Time Loop: See Mirror Match. Even more generally, Marc Remillard, one of the near-ultimate evolutions of humanity, goes back in time and, by his manipulation, ensures that he and the other Remillards will be born on schedule.
- Surprise Incest: Paul's affair with Laura Tremblay produces Cyndia, and she and Marc find out a couple of years into their marriage that they're actually half-siblings. They don't really care.
- Tangled Family Tree: Mostly because of the incest. Don is Denis' father, and thus the ancestor of the Dynasty, but he's also the father of Annarita Latimer, making Teresa his granddaughter, and she marries Paul. Paul is also the grandfather both ways of Hagen and Cloud. There's a family tree printed in each book. It gets complicated.
- Taking You with Me: Teresa attempts to drag Jack along with her when she suicides.
- Teleportation: Recognized as a very rare metafaculty outside the primary five, dimensional jumping (d-jumping) allows an operant who possesses the ability to psychically generate an upsilon-field to break into and out of hyperspace, enabling faster than light travel to any destination without the need for a starship (limited only by the operant's focus and pain threshold). One of the three humans shown to be able to d-jump over very long distances is shown in this series to be able to do so instinctively: Fury/Denis Remillard; the other two were Felice in the Saga of the Exiles (also instinctively) and Marc Remillard, who learned the d-jump program from Felice when she d-jumped to zorch him.
- Teleportation Sickness: Breaking between the barrier between normal space and hyperspace on the opposite ends of faster-than-light travel incurs pain proportional to the ratio (the displacement factor, "df") between the real-space travel distance and the total length of subjective time spent in hyperspace. Operants who know the mitigator program have this pain drastically lowered, and thus can endure higher df. Unifex uses the mitigator when he cuts short Rogi's vacation on Denali and brings him directly back to his New Hampshire office via one d-jump; he learned that from Creyn six million years ago.
- Threat Backfire: A poor choice of words version: Marc tells Jack, a six-month-old baby, that certain knowledge would scare the crap out of him. Jack replies, succinctly, "Diapers."
- Twin Telepathy: Quite literally with Rogi and Don.
- Twisted Christmas: The Dynasty perform the operation to get rid of Fury, who is residing inside Denis, on Christmas Day.
- Trailers Always Spoil:
- In the exterior of the Frame, the reader is told practically the entire outcome before the start of each book.
- The family tree also points out exactly who dies and when.
- Unreliable Narrator: Averted. The prologue explains that the narrator's unique position means he's the only person who can tell the full and true tale to the galaxy.
- Utopia Justifies the Means:
- The Simbiari attitude towards humanity. That little thing called "freedom" was the first thing to go by the wayside.
- Atoning Unifex tells the other Lylmik that the Metapsychic Rebellion has to happen, with all the loss of life that this entails, for humanity to finally Unify.
- Unification itself is being forcibly imposed on all of metapsychic humanity. Opting out is not an option, and nonpsychic humans are to be phased out.
- Villainous Incest: The Hydras are first cousins, and after Gordo's death are all cheerfully screwing each other. Although considering all the other incest in the books treated with a reasonable degree of sympathy (more cousins, siblings, half-siblings, and Victor and Denis being abused by their father as babies and becoming a monster and the core personality of Fury, respectively), this doesn't come off as particularly remarkable.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Marc Remillard is willing to do anything, up to and including incest, murder and even genocide, to protect humanity from the Unity that the Galactic Milieu is imposing on them.
- Wham Line - See Cliffhanger; in the very last sentence of Diamond Mask, Anne Remillard comes into Rogi's bookshop and tells him that Denis is Fury.
- What Measure Is a Non-Super?: Non-operant humans have no voice in their own government; while the majority of humanity is strongly opposed to Unity and supports the rebellion, only the operants matter (and a firm majority of operants back Unity). Even the Intervention was done by the request of a metaconcert of operants; no one else was asked if they wanted to be taken over by the Simbiari.
