Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novella, Elder Race, plays around with a concept that sci-fi fans are likely familiar with from author Arthur C. Clarke’s highly resonant quote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. It starts out as an epic fantasy story where a young princess, Lynesse Fourth Daughter, climbs a forbidden peak to seek the aid of a mysterious wizard known as Nyrgoth Elder. She needs his help to rid the world of a demon that is plaguing the surrounding nations and threatening their world. However, this classic fantasy premise is quickly subverted in the second chapter by switching to the perspective of Nyrgoth (aka Nyr Illim Tevitch) himself. Rather than being a powerful mage, he is actually an anthropologist second class of Earth’s Explorer Corps. All standard issue technology provided to him as a scientist studying the local culture — such as robotic drones, bio-modified body with self-healing agents, even a Dissociative Cognition System to suppress his emotions — have been the actual source of his centuries-old legend, and reputation as a powerful sorcerer, and slayer of demons.

Tchaikovsky’s prose is pretty straightforward and well-written. He doesn’t use either the elevated and descriptive language that you might find in a grand fantasy story, such as Lord of the Rings, nor the complex technical language that you might find in a hard sci-fi story. However, he does a great job of juggling the narrative and playing with the storytelling in this novella. At first, it’s just a fantasy story told with the classic elements of an epic quest. After we meet the scientist, we get the other side of the coin with his version of events. Then we continue to flip back and forth, alternating between both perspectives. This pattern was pretty fun, and made me feel curious each time about how the sci-fi version was going to explain the events of the fantasy. There is even a chapter where we get a literally side-by-side recounting of the local origin myth juxtaposed with the account of the science ship first making planetfall. From that point on we get a semi-combined version of events, where both characters are together and we merely shift points-of-view. Unfortunately, in this last phase  the storytelling became the most normal, with less distinction between the fantasy and the sci-fi sides. This was the point when the book started to go a bit downhill for me.

The story started to stray from the original idea of revealing how science was misinterpreted as magic and became much less special or unique. The focus fell more on Nyr the scientist feeling disappointed that he’d been abandoned by Earth, and coming to realize that the best moments of his life were spent with the locals. Lyn the warrior princess had been trying to prove herself, and push back against her doubters, as the youngest member of the royal family. Even though they were together fighting a kind of otherworldly demon, the story seemed more interested in the characters and their issues. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. I am generally open to exploring characters and what makes them tick, but sadly these characters didn’t seem as interesting as the story premise that we began with. Even within this otherworldIy context, the characters felt ordinary and a little dull. This was made even more frustrating in the audiobook by the narrator’s performance, which came out in a very melodramatic, halting cadence (reminding me of William Shatner’s speech patterns as Captain Kirk on Star Trek).

After the great start and the clever setup, I was hoping that Tchaikovsky would have had some clever twists in mind, sticking with the idea that the magical, demonic enemy might also have been something scientific (which was actually not clearly explained even by the end). I had hoped that the author would have come up with a fresh, interesting way to resolve the story that acknowledged both fantasy and sci-fi perspectives and brought them together to synthesize something even more intriguing. Instead, the original premise kind of fell by the wayside, and we ended up watching these two main characters come to terms with their own issues, instead. The ending was not bad. In fact it was a nicely comfortable ending, but I felt like it squandered much of the promise of how the story began.

3 stars

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