Elder Race

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a masterful storyteller. He’s able to take an idea and elevate it with his creative decisions so what could have been a simple tale becomes a short epic. In this novella, he took an interesting premise and made a technologically-driven, mythical story that nods to mental health and is fun to read.

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Because her mother, the queen, had heard them all out. Had sorrowed with them. Had expressed the Crown’s deepest sympathies. And then, in private council with her daughters and advisers, had confirmed that nothing would be done. Nobody believed there was a demon, only that the eternal infighting between the forest polities had reached some new peak, and every finger pointed at its neighbour and cried dark magic. Not for the first time.

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He uses a very clever device in this story: The characters who are native to the planet speak in one way and the person who comes from Earth (who is considered a wizard) speaks in an entirely different way.

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So even when the Earth man tries his best to tell the hard truth to the natives that he isn’t a wizard at all, their language is such that they hear “I’m not a wizard; I’m a wizard, or at best a wizard”.

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Because this culture has no words for ’scientist' or ‘drone’, they hear ‘magician’ and ‘familiar’. This artistic choice confers a sheen of fabulous to the book.

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I suspect that there is a whole level of subtext hidden amongst their suffixes and registers, cases and inflections where every word has a dozen different variants depending on precisely who’s talking to whom about what. I’ve wondered if, early on in the colony’s development, the colonists sat down and decided that they really, really needed to be clear about exactly what everyone meant, and now the language is a tangled thicket I have to hack through with a machete.

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The style of writing in this is 180º to that of the style he used in the Final Architecture series, but the author’s ability to create memorable characters shines in this work as well. What an excellent writer Mr. Tchaikovsky is! I look forward to reading more of his work.

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