What if Gandalf were not an embodied angel but a second-class science bureaucrat anxious not to contaminate the societies he is studying? (If he looked a bit like Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) What if Frodo were a 16-year-old princess J.G. I found it impossible to read this book without thinking of Tolkien. Up to that point, the conflicts are about roles and realities and mutual misunderstandings. The monster – Lynesse calls it a demon – is real enough, though Lyn has not managed to convince anyone at her mother’s court of the threat, and Nyr is skeptical as well, until they finally encounter the demonic infestation, nearly three-quarters of the way through the book. The crucial variation of the familiar low-tech/high-tech science-fantasy scenario is that the story alternates between the viewpoints of Lynesse (third person) and Nyr (first person), and that it is only partly about Lynesse’s quest (yes, there’s a quest) to rid the world of a monstrous intruder. The first chapter gives us Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a plucky, scapegrace (and quite junior) princess and her doughty, smartmouth companion, Esha Free Mark, on a journey to a wizard’s tower to assert the terms of an “ancient compact.” The next chapter reveals that the wizard they call Nygroth Elder, “last of the ancients,” is actually Nyr Illim Tevitch, “anthropologist second class of Earth’s Explorer Corps,” left behind in suspended animation to mind the store after his colleagues returned to headquarters centuries earlier. Tchaikovsky, however, is up to something a bit different in Elder Race. Clarke’s sufficiently advanced technology, etc.) or that presents a magical universe that nevertheless operates according to rules as intelligible as those of material science (see Walter Jon Williams’s Metropolitan or Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter). The usual science-fantasy recipe is a setting that presents as fantasy – medieval/feudal-ish societies with aristocrats, magicians, monsters, and warrior-heroes – but that finally explains the magic in material rather than supernatural terms (Arthur C.

Cover by Emmanuel Shu.Īdrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race puckishly mixes ingredients from both science fiction and fantasy cookbooks.

Tchaikovsky elder race