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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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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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