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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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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.