Day 375: Elder Race

On Monday I wrote a first impressions post about this book, but today I want to get into more detail. Hopefully that was enough time for anybody who wanted to read the story to get their hands on it. If not, I'll urge you again now, read this one blind! Adrian Tchaikovsky uses your expectations to play with the ideas behind genre in such an interesting way, and hearing about it before hand will ruin the experience. That said, I can't help but talk about this one, so here goes.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

These are Arthur C. Clark's three laws. The last one is the best known law, but I think Tchaikovsky knows them all by heart. He hits every one of them, especially the third, and explores the very limits of their implications in 'Elder Race.'

The story begins as any typical high fantasy would. Princess Lynesse, fourth daughter in line for the greatest kingdom in the land has a problem. Her mother and three sisters have all grown up into proud, competent stateswomen, while she is still obsessed with the stories from her childhood. Those that have captured her imagination the most are no fantasies though. Ulmoth, a tyrant who used his knowledge of the elder language to command terrible monsters on the battlefield, long ago tried to use the beasts' might to rule the entire continent. Only Lynnesse's great grandmother was able to stand against him, with the aid of legendary sorcerer Nyrgoth the Elder, last of his race. Nyrgoth's tower sits high in an impenetrable mountain range, looming as it always has over the kingdoms of the land, where immortal Nyrgoth sleeps to the current day. Lynesse's obsession with those old tales of heroics and magic had rendered her unable to turn a blind eye to new reports of a demonic threat brewing in one of the frontier lands at the edge of the wilderness. Her stately mother and mature sisters have all deemed the 'threat' a bunch of tall tales. A plague or bandits spreading through a small, faraway kingdom is no business of theirs. But Lynesse cannot ignore the impassioned pleas of the people who come to beg for her mother's help. She leaps at the chance to do some heroics of her own, and has signed on her merfolk companion Esha to climb with her up the treacherous path to the Sorcerer's towers and enlist his help once again.

Nyr Illim Tevich, anthropologist second class, wakes to find that one of the locals has entered his outpost. Usually this would be a terrible breach of the anthropological society's rules, but as he recalls, he already broke all of those when he stopped a tyrant from using old Earth mining equipment to take over the entire post-technological colony. And besides, he hasn't received a single message from them in three hundred years of cryosleep. Whatever presence Earth once had in this region of space is now gone. He's on his own. Now this Princess Lynesse, the spiting image of his old love, is asking for his help against some new demon, and if he's honest with himself, he has nothing better to do than to go back to sleep forever.

The dual perspective that Tchaikovsky immediately establishes is what carries this story to the end. Lynesse's ideas about magic, heroism, demons, and monsters lends itself perfectly to the fantastic adventure that she tackles with her friends. Nyr is the picture of a sorcerer, a gaunt, seven foot tall ancient with horns (implants that let him talk to the satellite in orbit), and clad in robes that warm themselves, he is the epitome of Clarke's third rule from Lyn's perspective. Her convictions about Nyr's magical status wane as things progress and he tries to convince everyone of what he really is: a person from long ago with nobody left. She grows into a wiser, more confident person as she struggles to understand Nyr's perspective, uses her stately side to give inspiring speeches to embittered locals, and presses forward through hardship when the demon she's after pushes back. She's everything a fantasy story could ask for.

When we see things from Nyr's perspective though, everything changes. He's all alone on a planet far from where he was born, thrown thousands of years into the future by accumulated hibernation, surrounded by a bunch of backward medieval people who wholeheartedly believe that he is close to a god. We see everything through a new lens. Lyn's friend Esha, a mer-person by all rights, is actually descended from the bioengineered workers that ordinally established the colony. His anthropological side is constantly comparing what he sees to what he knows about the past, seeing evidence of old relics from colonial logos to linguistic carryovers. At first he's convinced this new threat that Lynesse has brought to his door is just another instance of the locals digging up old technology. His 'elder language' (an old Earth language) is all he'll need to command the worker drones to shut down and quit bothering people. Then he'll be able to return to his outpost and live out his miserable days. He runs straight into laws one and two when he finds out what he's really up against. A strange biological growth that seems to be sending messages through an alternate dimension. Its impossible, as close to magic as he's ever encountered before, and yet, there it is. With a new frontier to explore, and new friends to go there with, he finally has something to live for again.

This story is short, sweet, and to the point. It perfectly blends everything sci-fi and fantasy into a perfect package that I can't stop thinking about. The only thing you could ever ask from it is more please. I'm convinced he could make a whole series with it, but the book is currently a standalone. Maybe it's best that way, as a complete, self-contained adventure. I don't think I've read anything else that blends two genres as seamlessly as 'Elder Race' does. It not only has all the hallmarks of both, but even goes further than either could alone. This story is very much greater than the sum of all it's parts.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley