{"id":9745,"date":"2023-01-17T11:21:37","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T16:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9745"},"modified":"2023-01-17T11:24:56","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T16:24:56","slug":"elder-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/17\/elder-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Elder Race."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Adrian Tchaikovsky\u2019s Elder Race<\/a><\/em> made the shortlist for this year\u2019s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he\u2019d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It\u2019s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who\u2019s supposed to be a great wizard is, in fact, just a human who possesses sufficiently advanced technology that it appears to be magic?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u2019wizard\u2019 Nygroth Elder is, in fact, Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist left in stasis to keep an eye on this colonized planet while the remainder of his crew has long since left to return to Earth \u2013 which may or may not still be a going concern. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess so junior you might call her a spare to the spare, believes there\u2019s an existential threat to her people, so she treks to Nyr\u2019s tower to try to enlist his help to fight what she calls a demon, which her own mother thinks is a fabrication to try to gain attention or glory. Nyr reluctantly agrees to help, even though his directive is to observe but not interfere, even if refraining might cause harm to the people he\u2019s watching, and they set off on a quest to find and defeat the threat. Along the way, the culture clash between the two emerges through their languages, as Nyr can\u2019t even explain what a scientist is, and the translation engine he uses makes everything sound to Lynesse like some sort of magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

Elder Race<\/em> is a quest novel \u2013 or novella, which is how the Hugo Awards characterized it, giving it a nomination in that category in 2022 \u2013 but one with a metatextual component as well that, in some ways, is the more interesting of the two. Tchaikovsky tells the story by alternating narration between Lynesse and Nyr, thus presenting both sides of most of their conversations, which operates as a commentary on fantasy literature and works that try to blend fantasy and science, as well as a more humanist look at the challenges of communicating across cultures. The fact that Lynesse\u2019s language lacks so many words that Nyr takes for granted and finds himself unable to express even through translation recalled Samuel Delany\u2019s classic novella Babel-17<\/em>, which takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis \u2013 that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view the world \u2013 and turns it into an entire story, where a language is a weapon that alters speakers\u2019 minds. Here language is less insidious, but stands as a concrete example of the difficulty of communicating across all of the boundaries that separate people, not just language but culture, history, religion, and more. Language is the visible manifestation of what amounts to a religious difference between Lynesse\u2019s people and Nyr; what her family and subjects believe is magic is just technology they\u2019ve lost in the centuries since humans colonized this planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nyr is the more interesting and developed character of the two, in part because Lynesse is, by design, depicted as na\u00efve \u2013 she\u2019s young, but also not very worldly even within the confines of this civilization, and her faith in Nyr based on a historical anecdote is almost charming in its innocence. Nyr, meanwhile, has to grapple with both his role as potential savior, or as a failed savior, to Lynesse\u2019s people, while also facing the fact that he might be severed permanently from his own civilization, condemned to a lonely existence where he enters long periods of suspended animation and can\u2019t forge enduring relationships with anyone. He encounters crippling depression and covers it up with the help of embedded tech that takes the old trope about men compartmentalizing their emotions and turns it into software; he can just push it aside and deal with it later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tchaikovsky \u2013 who spells his name Czajkowski outside of his writing, as he\u2019s of Polish descent rather than Russian \u2013 packs a lot into the 200 pages of Elder Race<\/em>, without skimping on the quest part of the story, which is the real narrative that drives the book forward. You could probably just read this as a straight-up quest without giving the larger themes a second thought and still enjoy it. I found those themes gave this novel more heft and staying power in my mind after I finished. It\u2019s to Czajkowski\u2019s credit that he managed this in such a brief novel that revolves almost entirely around just two core characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I\u2019m many books behind in my writeups, but I\u2019m currently reading Brian Clegg\u2019s Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adrian Tchaikovsky\u2019s Elder Race made the shortlist for this year\u2019s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he\u2019d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It\u2019s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[66,866,122,161,524],"class_list":["post-9745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-british-literature","tag-contemporary-literature","tag-fantasy","tag-highly-recommended","tag-science-fiction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9745"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9747,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9745\/revisions\/9747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}