Elder Race (Tchaikovsky)

Elder Race
Adrian Tchaikovsky (2021)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a Pandemic Book Club pick for the month of September. A "novella" was chosen because many of us are teachers and September is busy.

This is a Tor.com book, but not one I'd heard of before. I might've seen a promo for it when it was first released as I'm on Tor's mailing list. I'm also part of their book club and have gotten many free books from their site.

The book tries to blend fantasy and science-fiction by telling parallel narratives. Lyn and Nyr are the two POV characters. Lyn is the Fourth Daughter of the current regent of her city/realm/whatever, and she goes to seek help from the wizard/sorceror on top of the mountain. She'd seen his castle once before as a child so she knows where to go. The wizard had helped her ancestor defeat another threat to the world once before.

Nyr is actually an anthropologist, formerly of Earth, who sleeps in a chamber waiting for the ship that dropped him to return and pick him up. He's supposed to be watching the people and taking notes, but it seems like he's been asleep since the last time he interfered with the culture, which has forgotten almost everything about where they came from. It's all just myth and fable now.

They have a hard time communicating because the language has changed and there aren't words to describe some of the ideas he wishes to convey. There is one chapter which has a side by side of what he's saying and what she's hearing/understanding. It is frustrating for him. He's trying to explain that there is no magic.

The story is good, but the ending was disappointing because it wasn't a case of magic vs science. The threat of the "demons" is real in a science way as well. Nyr doesn't understand what the portal is or why creatures are acting as they are. There are attempts to communicate, but he can't. Maybe this was done to show that it's more advanced than his science, so it's magic, but I don't think so. For one thing, it isn't shown to be more advanced, just different, like two computers that can't talk to each other. So far all the talk about there being no demons and no magic, this was essentially both, and the primitives were "correct" all along.

I did enjoy it, but I did tire of Nyr's "woe is me! no one will ever return for me! I shouldn't have interfered. I'm a terrible anthropologist!". I finished it two days ago, and I don't even remember if he went back to sleep or tried to live happily ever after with Lyn. The problem with the latter is that she had been expecting the wizard to name his price for his services, which she assumed meant that she would have to become his bride or his consort. So such an ending would confirm her fears.

Lyn didn't quite get her moment to shine. When Nyr is attacked, she prepares to go through the arch to do battle with the demon. However, Nyr tells her that there is no "through". She would be "unmade" as soon as she passed the arch. So she doesn't get a battle, but she does get to strike something else.

Update: The overwhelming response of the book club was positive, and they didn't mind that Nyr didn't have all the answers and that there was something that was so beyond him that it might as well have been magic. Except, to me, it was something that was contacting him, so there could've been more of an answer.