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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 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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