Clare L. Deming

Elder Race is a short novel (or novella) and was the first fiction by Adrian Tchaikovsky that I have read (paid link). It was nominated for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novella. Read on below to see what I thought.

Here is the blurb:

In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, a junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe.

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…

This story is told through alternating perspectives, switching between Nyr, a depressed anthropologist, and Lynesse, a princess looking to prove herself. It is the tale of a lost colony of Earth, and Nyr’s failed mission to study the people there. At the core of the story is the juxtaposition between Nyr’s science fictional view of the world and Lynesse’s fantastical view of technology that she has no way to understand. The story’s genre depends on which perspective we take.

In the end, it is a work of science fiction, but one that encompasses the difficulty in determining genre in some stories. My favorite example of this is Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, in which McCaffrey always presented the stories as science fiction (paid link). However, in my own reading of those books, they always felt like fantasy, since the specifics of the technology don’t matter until the books at the end of the timeline.

In Elder Race, another aspect that surprised me was how the story depicted Nyr’s mental health challenges. He uses his technology to suppress the effects of depression for a time, but he also knows that this is not a solution for his condition. We see a lot of heroes that either ignore their trauma and do what needs to be done or experience intense emotion without suffering more specifically. In this story, Nyr can only put the effects off for so long, and this adds a unique factor to this tale.

I rated this book as one of my top reads for 2023 and put another series by this author on my to-be-read list. Have you read anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky? Let me know in the comments (above).

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