SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 



Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky


Elder Race is the latest novella by prolific author Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose output has been very hit or miss for me.  I've really liked his novellas, but very much not loved his novels, for various reasons.  Still not only is this a novella, but one of my good friends on twitter has hyped this as one of his favorite works of 2021, so I was kind of excited to see how this turned out.  

And well I liked Elder Race, although not as much as my friend.  It has a real interesting concept - alternating chapters from a fantasy and then a SF perspective on the same events, where the characters telling each chapter's story hear the other's words and language in very different ways, as they both try to figure out what they're doing and what if anything they can do about the threat facing the world they're present on.  That said, I found other than that concept, there isn't much here, especially not in the fantasy half of the story, which really prevented me from really loving it.  But it's certainly worth your time.  

Quick Plot Summary:  Lynesse Fourth Daughter has always been belittled by her family and by her mother the Queen - being less important for her status, and for being unwilling to shed her dreams and beliefs in the magic of the past.  And so when reports come from the outlands of a demon arising like the days of old, and the Queen refuses to help, Lynesse and her friend go without permission to the tower of Nyrgoth Elder, the sorcerer who helped her ancestor defeat that demon ages past.....

Nyr Illim Tevitch is an anthropologist second class of Earth's Explorer Corps.  Centuries ago he came to this planet to examine what had become of Earth's colonists there, only to be left behind by his crewmates....seemingly for good.  One time in the past he broke his rules and helped the locals, helped a warrior princess he fell in love with face off against old Earth technology, but since then he has slept in hibernation in his tower.  But when the ancestor of that princess comes back to his tower, he embarks once more, even if it means he might be breaking the rules of his profession one more time.....

Thoughts:  So the gimmick/idea of Elder Race is one of language.  Every chapter alternates between Lynesse and Nyr's perspectives, and they see the world, and more interestingly they hear the world, in very different ways.  To Lynesse, everything is fantasy-ish, and Nyr's language is flowerish and ancient, with his talk of technology all being heard as magic and wizardry, no matter how much he tries to protest it isn't.  She's an eager young woman desperate to do good like her ancestor and to help the people, despite her mom's refusal to do so, and is fascinated by the wizard.  To Nyr of course, everything is just the result of peoples who came to this world as Earth colonists, engineered in various ways to better handle the world, who have lost the knowledge of their ancestors and are far behind him.  And it just makes him so depressed, because all his non-interference isn't doing any good since it's obvious no one is going to come back, leading him to hiding his emotions behind a program that suppresses them until he lets them out at night, which is hardly a great way to handle depression, something that he can't quite explain to these fantasy peoples (in a great touch, his attempt to explain so is heard by Lynesse as him talking about a literal demon chasing him).  

The story really works well when it deals with language and understanding between the two, and how each hears the other, climaxing impressively with one chapter where the same passage is told side by side from the other's perspective.  And then there's the ending, where it appears that neither of the two really can comprehend the threat, putting them in many ways on the same footing.  

Alas, other than that gimmick, there often really isn't that much of super interest in the story.  Lynesse's story is so stereotypical younger fantasy princess, that it never really is that interesting in and of itself.  By contrast Nyr's story is actually interesting, as he deals with being abandoned, with the princess he loved being dead a hundred years past, with the question of whether his non-interference actually matters anymore really weighing on him.  But even there there isn't that much meat on it, and the split of chapters prevents us from really seeing too much of Nyr grappling with his depression and making a choice on how to change things, it just sort of comes about here out of necessity.  

So yeah, Elder Race is interesting, and worth your time.  But the story is too bare bones for me to really recommend it that highly, so unlike my friend's ballot, it won't be on my Hugo Ballot.