The Many-Colored Land is a science fiction novel by American author Julian May, published in 1981.

The novel sets the series up by introducing the story of each of the characters.

[2] There is a lady sweet and kind, Was never face so pleas'd my mind; I did but see her passing by, And yet I love her till I die.

Bryan Grenfell's beloved, a woman of Celtic ancestry who never felt 'at home' in the Mileu goes into Exile and is discovered to have grandmaster-level latent creative metafunctions by the Tanu.

Her power and beauty attract Nodonn Battlemaster who takes her as his wife and later proves that she has some Tanu ancestry in her DNA, causing shockwaves among Human and Tanu alike considering the 6-million year time gap between the Tanu/Firvulag ascendancy and the rise of Humanity, while also explaining how metafunctions manifested in the Human gene pool in the first place.