Elder Race (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Elder Race
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tordotcom
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Lynesse Fourth Daughter may have seen enough Storm seasons to be called a woman, but to her royal mother and sisters she's still little more than a child, clinging to fireside stories of monsters and magic and heroic saviors who rise in times of darkness. When talk of a "demon" in the distant forest kingdoms reaches the castle, she alone takes the refugees at their word - and, against the queen's express wishes, takes it upon herself to travel to the mountains and the tower of the sorcerer. In ages past, it is said, Elder Nyr left his lofty tower to travel with her ancestor and stop a great evil, and he swore he would return if ever the crown needed his services again. Surely stopping a demon counts as such a need.
Nyr Illim Tevich came to this world centuries ago, a second-class anthropologist studying the lost colonies that survived from the first wave of humanity's spread across the stars. There used to be four archaeologists, using drones and satellites and stasis fields to unobtrusively observe the divergence in the local population over generations, which, like many lost colonies, has completely abandoned old knowledge and tech and relegated their origins to fanciful creation myths. But when trouble arose back home, the other three headed back to Earth... and never returned. So it was no wonder he took to bending the rules of the mission a little - or a lot, in the case of the very persuasive queen some years back, who needed help with a local unearthed old colonial tech and managed just enough mastery of it to become a danger. Nyr told himself that would be the end of it, that he'd stay in stasis even until his companions returned or signals from Earth resumed (or the technology failed). But now a princess stands on his doorstep, demanding that he honor a promise he made generations ago, with some likely-exaggerated talk of a "demon".
Despite himself, "Sorcerer" Nyr lets himself be drawn from his tower and into Lynesse's quest... only to learn that, despite his greater knowledge and technology, there are dangers even an "Elder sorcerer" may be too weak to solve.

REVIEW: This is an oddball little novella, a "lost colony" story where old knowledge and technology has been relegated to the realm of wizardry, where the very language they speak prevents Nyr from explaining the truth to Lynesse and her companions: that he is no sorcerer, that there is no magic, and whatever role the storytellers may have assigned to him and his "Elder" race is just that - a story. His status as last of his group of anthropologists already left him prone to depression, which is only compounded when he comes to the realization that he may well be the last of his people in more ways than that, now that signals from Earth have stopped altogether. Technology lets him defer emotional reactions, but breakdowns can only be delayed, not prevented. Meanwhile, he struggles with his original "prime directive" of noninterference that he already violated, and his own realization that his anthropologist's point of view has left him seeing the locals as objects of study, not living human beings. Lynesse, meanwhile, strives to reconcile her lived experiences with Nyr with the stories she's heard of her heroic ancestor (and other tales she's inhaled like oxygen, with more credulity than perhaps was wise), literally unable to understand him when he tries to set her straight. She remains a little too naive a little too long, to be honest, though toward the end it's clear she's clinging to her dreams of heroism out of desperation more than strict belief anymore: not only has she pinned all her hopes, in defiance of her family, on Nyr's magic, but the "demon" - an all-too-real danger - is something so terrifyingly wrong that there is no other hope of defeating it save through the miraculous intervention of some hero out of legend. As a novella, it doesn't have too much space to explore its deeper ideas or issues, and something about the story starts to feel unbalanced as a result, in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on but which left me just unsatisfied enough by the end to shave a half-star from the rating.

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