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If life is what we make it, then why's it always breaking?
It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.
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P.S. Save me from this umgeshtuppet meeting.
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I can read at any time! I just don't write regularly about it. Movies and TV are the unpredictable stuff.
P.S. Save me from this umgeshtuppet meeting.
Why are you in a meeting.
*hugs*
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*hugs*
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Have you considered the immediate necessity of saving one of your cats from the other? It probably isn't even untrue.
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Everyone wins!
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You're right about Enchantress from the Stars! I have not read that book in ages. Have still never read the Steerswoman series.
[edit] I am trying to decide if my formative post-technological, pre-industrial science fantasy actually could be Pern. It is ironically one of the forms of science fiction I can't remember not knowing, but I read metric tons of McCaffrey early and so the chances are good it was the one I spent the most time with.
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With Steerswoman, I guess it gets kind of that way toward the end, when the wizards are involved, but to me that plays off the reader's POV, in a sense, rather than the different characters.
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I want to reread Sister Light, Sister Dark one of these days; I can't remember if I ever found White Jenna.
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I saw it on Reactor when I was doing my weekly installment of belatedly catching up on Reading the Weird! I still have to watch the first-season finale, but I am already looking forward.
I want to reread Sister Light, Sister Dark one of these days; I can't remember if I ever found White Jenna.
Admittedly—horrifyingly—it was over a decade ago now, but at last re-read they both held up. Sister Light, Sister Dark was one of the formative books of my childhood: I read it talismanically, over and over again, the year I turned nine. It took me until high school to get hold of White Jenna, which was in many ways not the second half of the story I had been expecting, but I think that was part of the point. I would recommend it also. They have been reprinted together as The Books of Great Alta. There is a third which I did not like at all and kind of refuse to recognize.
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It's the first thing of his I've read. It was not a shape of story I had never seen before, but it was shaped very well and I had not seen any of its characters exactly, which counts for a lot with me. I have heard nothing but raves about his series for years, but nothing flashed over to active interest until this one. Alien Clay (2024) has also been sounding attractive.
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I'll hear recommendations for pretty much anything with the caveat that I am a hard sell on category romance. The Mohs scale of science fiction is not that much of a consideration with me. I used to read more fantasy and have trended in recent years more toward weird fiction generally, while still reading a whole lot of historical novels and pulp.
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Of the ones I've read, I particularly recommend Guns of the Dawn, which is kind of "Lizzie Bennet goes to war". I also am very fond of the Children of Time series, with my favorite being the second book. The Doors of Eden does some very cool things with worldbuilding, though the characters and plot are less interesting (also heads up that one of the POV characters is a (present-day in our world) fascist, though Tchaikovsky is very clear that Fascism is Bad).
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Alas. I may still try it: I have a friend who liked it whose tastes are not unaligned and the premise remains appealing.
Of the ones I've read, I particularly recommend Guns of the Dawn, which is kind of "Lizzie Bennet goes to war". I also am very fond of the Children of Time series, with my favorite being the second book.
Good to know! What makes the second book your favorite?
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That is a compelling argument! I hope the fourth book works as well for you as the second did.
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I thought it was a trilogy!
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That continues to sound attractive to me!
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I did read Rocannon's World, but ages ago, and I can't remember anything beyond that I liked it. [ETA: I posted all this without reading the comments first--where I would have seen this comparison already brought up! D'oh!] One that stuck with me in a stronger way that maybe does the same sort of thing is Sylvia Engdahl's Enchantress from the Stars, where you get one character seeing everything in terms of dragons and enchantresses, another being from essentially a we're-the-advanced-people-and-can-do-what-we-want colonizer/extractor people, though he himself has qualms, and then one being from a society that's as much advanced technologically from the second as the second is from the first. I think you've read this? I know you've read The Far Side of Darkness, which was a sequel.
One thing the story doesn't do that I've come to really want my fiction to do is question the assumption about technological advancement equalling depth of thought or understanding ...
Anyway, good to know Elder Race is a fast read!
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Yes! Unlike multiple novellas of my recent acquaintance, it did not feel as though it should really have been either a novel or a novelette. I just finished it and wanted more stories from the same characters, which does not seem to have been the author's feeling about it.
I did read Rocannon's World, but ages ago, and I can't remember anything beyond that I liked it. [ETA: I posted all this without reading the comments first--where I would have seen this comparison already brought up! D'oh!]
It's not a problem! People can have the same referents! An Enchantress from the Stars-like interaction is part of the history of Elder Race; the novella itself is about what happens a century later.
One thing the story doesn't do that I've come to really want my fiction to do is question the assumption about technological advancement equalling depth of thought or understanding ...
You should definitely try Elder Race.
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Oh, I'm so glad! Everything seems to get cancelled before it's begun these days, especially expensive things like SFF, and lots of my flist and network seem to have been finding joy in it. (I don't have access to it, or in any realistic way to the books, much to my ongoing frustration. Hopefully a continued TV series may even prompt a sensible UK pbk edition as well as me being able to catch it somewhere, someday, when everyone else has gone off it).
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I started it a little cautiously because I had never glommed on to the books like so many people but expecting it to be fun and instead I seem to love it. I hope it does become accessible to you in some reasonable fashion and very much doubt I will have gone off it by then. I seem to have attached to it with an intensity usually reserved for books or movies or television I watched for the first time thirty years ago. It's an unusual experience.
(There should be a sensible UK paperback edition! The books have won awards right and left since the first novella!)
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Aww. Nice when it happens, though!
And I shall continue to keep an eye out for a chance to make my own mind up re. TV and books both.
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Since you mentioned you hadn't read Tchaikovsky before, I'll say that I liked both his Children of Time series and Shards of Earth series, disliked And Put Away Childish Things (which is a Narnia trope subversion), and DNF'ed Service Model. I have not yet read Alien Clay.
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None of them will exactly replicate the experience, but I thought of all of them while reading. Knowing that Tchaikovsky reads Gene Wolfe, I would also wonder if there's some influence from any of The Book of the New Sun (1980–87) or The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96), both of which pull the sci-fi-under-the-fantasy trick, although they deal less in the parallax of perspectives. I really loved about Elder Race that all of its main characters eventually get on something like the same page about the nature of their world, whatever language they use to describe it.
Since you mentioned you hadn't read Tchaikovsky before, I'll say that I liked both his Children of Time series and Shards of Earth series, disliked And Put Away Childish Things (which is a Narnia trope subversion), and DNF'ed Service Model. I have not yet read Alien Clay.
Data points appreciated! (The Narnia trope subversion would not have been my first choice in any case, but it's good to know not to steer accidentally for it. What happened with Service Model?)
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According to friends who have finished it, it gets interesting and good at the end, but it is possibly not worth slogging through the intervening boredom.
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Good reason to tap out, all right.
According to friends who have finished it, it gets interesting and good at the end, but it is possibly not worth slogging through the intervening boredom.
I am sorry it was not a short story.
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I cannot speak to how representative of his other work Elder Race is, but I really liked it.
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I hope you enjoy the others!
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