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A review by storytold
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
4.25
Feb 2024 reread: Exact same rating the second time, but for different reasons. Sometimes rehashing the classics rules. Funny how the alien entity was soooo standout to me on the first read but I egregiously misremembered it and it was not at all what I thought, which made my reason for a reread moot. A lovely way to spend a winter Thursday, though.
Original review:
4.5, rounded down because I didn't quite experience its intended emotional gravitas. This was really great—I did not intend to read almost the whole thing in one sitting, but I did. So far Tchaikovshy's writing has failed to completely immerse me emotionally, which I tend to need for a 5-star read, but each of his books I've read has been impressively structured and thought out, with incredibly compelling creative elements around linguistics. So far I've only read the Children of Time series, elements of which I could identify in this book, but tonally this is quite different, and I was surprised by how light, quick, and fun this book was.
We follow Nyr, a scientist from Earth-that-was who has effectively been abandoned on the post-Earth colony he was sent to study, and Lynesse, one of the pastoral locals who asks Nyr to help them defeat a demon in his capacity as a wizard. Lynesse's POV reliably sounds and feels like pastoral fantasy, and Nyr's reliably sounds like science fiction, and they switch every chapter, which sometimes leads to some really entertaining chapter transitions. There is one chapter in the middle where Nyr is trying to tell a story, and Lyn hears the story as he has translated it exactly how it corresponds to the local origin mythology, and they are pasted side by side in a table—a narrative technique I absolutely love and have never seen in traditionally published fiction before. I'd love to see more of that, and it was really skillfully done here.
I was frequently delighted to the point of spontaneous laughter by the craft in the book and found it surprisingly funny for an SFF book. One does love a lonely emo transhumanist scientist who doesn't want to be a wizard. In ways, parts of this story felt familiar just because I've spent a lot of time this year already reading Tchaikovsky, and I wish the ending had had a little more meat to it, but nevertheless Tchaikovsky has become an auto-read author for me.
Original review:
4.5, rounded down because I didn't quite experience its intended emotional gravitas. This was really great—I did not intend to read almost the whole thing in one sitting, but I did. So far Tchaikovshy's writing has failed to completely immerse me emotionally, which I tend to need for a 5-star read, but each of his books I've read has been impressively structured and thought out, with incredibly compelling creative elements around linguistics. So far I've only read the Children of Time series, elements of which I could identify in this book, but tonally this is quite different, and I was surprised by how light, quick, and fun this book was.
We follow Nyr, a scientist from Earth-that-was who has effectively been abandoned on the post-Earth colony he was sent to study, and Lynesse, one of the pastoral locals who asks Nyr to help them defeat a demon in his capacity as a wizard. Lynesse's POV reliably sounds and feels like pastoral fantasy, and Nyr's reliably sounds like science fiction, and they switch every chapter, which sometimes leads to some really entertaining chapter transitions. There is one chapter in the middle where Nyr is trying to tell a story, and Lyn hears the story as he has translated it exactly how it corresponds to the local origin mythology, and they are pasted side by side in a table—a narrative technique I absolutely love and have never seen in traditionally published fiction before. I'd love to see more of that, and it was really skillfully done here.
I was frequently delighted to the point of spontaneous laughter by the craft in the book and found it surprisingly funny for an SFF book. One does love a lonely emo transhumanist scientist who doesn't want to be a wizard. In ways, parts of this story felt familiar just because I've spent a lot of time this year already reading Tchaikovsky, and I wish the ending had had a little more meat to it, but nevertheless Tchaikovsky has become an auto-read author for me.