Book Review: Elder Race

An intriguing sci-fi/fantasy novella from Adrian Tchaikovsky, exploring mental health, language barriers and the old Clarkian adage about ‘sufficiently advanced technology’.

When I picked up Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky, I wasn’t expecting the tale to remind me of the Shadeward Saga. But with its high fantasy setting amid a hard sci-fi backdrop, I was pleasantly surprised. This was a pretty quick read for me and I’m finding that novellas give me a rather satisfying feeling of progress for a normally slow reader such as I am. The cover art for Elder Race is absolutely gorgeous and depicts the Tower featured within beautifully. It may surprise you to realise (as it did me) that even though I now have four of Adrian’s books, Elder Race is only the second of his I’ve read since Children of Time. I really must rectify that. ‘Buying books is a separate hobby to reading them’, or so I’ve heard. Apparently, it’s true.

Blurb

Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.

But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she tells herself). Although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it).

But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, and his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon…

Review

I really rather enjoyed Elder Race. At the same moment it was a fun quest fantasy and a strange and thoughtful anthropological hard sci-fi. Some have compared it to Le Guin’s works, and there are certainly some similarities in subject-matter. Just like a lot of Le Guin’s sci-fi work, one of the main characters—Nyr—is a human anthropologist studying the local, more primitive, human population. Here we see an old Earth colony has regressed over thousands of years to become a pre-industrial, medieval society. Nyr’s job is to study their culture from his tower over and across centuries, using suspended animation technology, satellite imagery and bodily augmentations. Then from the other perspective we have Queens and princesses, courtesans and peasants, with stories of sorcerers and warlords and empires. It’s all grand high fantasy stuff. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, desperate to prove her worth to her mother, the Queen, seeks out an ancient sorcerer sleeping within his tower to help defeat a demon.

The book alternates between these two perspectives as Nyr and Lynesse and her companions navigate barriers to language on their way to discover the truth behind the demon stories. And the ways in which the language barrier comes into play are both funny and frustrating. I absolutely hate the miscommunication trope in fiction, and in some ways, Elder Race embodies that trope, but it’s done so well, and it makes actual sense, that I enjoyed it here. I loved the way that Nyr’s attempts to explain who he really is using the local language which he doesn’t know fluently just reinforces Lynesse and her companions’ belief that he’s an actual wizard. His use of technology and basic physics around radiation and electromagnetism is so far beyond them that—in line with Clarke’s law—it really is indistinguishable from magic. And it’s not simply a failure to communicate well, but that their language he’s using has not yet developed analogues for the scientific concepts he’s trying to convey

The alternating format has its oddities, though—and this is more of a neutral observation than a criticism, as I was generally fine with it—Lynesse’s POV chapters were written in third-person past tense, whereas Nyr’s were in first-person present tense. This is a similar structure to Children of Time, and there I felt it fitted in perfectly, given the differences in the way spiders and humans perceive the world. But here we’ve got two groups of humans—separated by thousands of years of technological progress and cultural shifts, granted—but still fundamentally the same species of human. I didn’t feel that the POV shift made as much sense here. Though, it didn’t detract from my reading experience at all.

The other thing the book explores is mental health—specifically depression. It was fascinating how Nyr’s use of technology to separate himself from his depression, allowing him to continue doing his work, was handled. The bleed-through effects, the need to switch off the machine and feel those things when the buffer gets full, and his travelling companions’ reactions to learning what it is he’s doing. I would say that this was one of the most interesting aspects of the book. The plot itself takes a bit of a back seat in that regard.

Overall, I would definitely recommend Elder Race to anyone looking for a blend of sci-fi and fantasy that’s also engaging and really quick to read.