If life is what we make it, then why's it always breaking?

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[sovay]

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 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!)

[thisbluespirit]

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.

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.