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

[selkie]

I'm glad you seem to be able to read this week.
P.S. Save me from this umgeshtuppet meeting.

[starlady]

It reminded me a lot of Enchantress from the Stars. And also a little bit of the Steerswoman books.

[foxmoth]

I hadn't heard of the renewal but I'm glad I've heard it now!

I want to reread Sister Light, Sister Dark one of these days; I can't remember if I ever found White Jenna.

[gullyfoyle]

I started reading Tchaikovsky about a year ago and he's been nicely filling the Iain M. Banks-sized hole in my heart. I've read the Final Architecture series and a handful of his novellas, and enjoyed them all quite a bit, but haven't read Elder Race yet. I've been wanting to read the Children of Time series but for some reason those books have big waiting lists for checkout from the county library system. However today I got an alert that the first CoT book was available for Kindle for $2.99 as an Amazon Prime Days deal, so I bit. I just checked and it turns out the third one of the series is also available for $2.99, so I'll grab that one too.

[asakiyume]

Novella proportioned, you say? Okay, I will try 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!] 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!

[thisbluespirit]

On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.

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 don't have access to it, or in any realistic way to the books, much to my ongoing frustration. Hopefully a continued TV series may even prompt a sensible UK pbk edition as well as me being able to catch it somewhere, someday, when everyone else has gone off it).

[isis]

I'll have to try the other books you mentioned, since I loved Elder Race.

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.