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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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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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