I do not remember what part of our conversation in the end of year Cannonball Read Book Chat was that inspired me to put Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky onto my to read for the year. But I did add this science fiction novella to my list that day and then put it on my holds request list in January, proving that I was excited/interested enough to prioritize it to the early part of the year. But March me cannot remember specifically why December/January me did those things.
Which means that I entered this reading experience of Elder Race with a mostly blank slate. Unfortunately, I wish I did a little more digging in, because my reading experience led to very mixed results. Elder Race begins with Lynesse Fourth Daughter, who as the fourth daughter of the queen doesn’t have much to do with the running of court or ruling. But there is a demon terrorizing the surrounding lands and Lynesse decides to do as her great-grandmother had done and quest to the tower of the Elder Sorcerer and call-in the promise he made to come to their aid. However, the Elder is really an anthropologist from Earth named Nyr who was sent to study the population of Lynesse’s planet many generations after ships left Earth with colonists who now make up the population but no longer remember where their ancestors were from. He is alone, hoping against hope that someone from Earth will come and retrieve him but it’s been hundreds of years since the last communication. He finds himself pulled into Lynesse’s task for many known only to himself, but certain in his scientific knowledge that it isn’t a demon running around causing havoc.
Tchaikovsky structured the book in alternating POV chapters between Lynesse and Nyr, and those chapters are written in different vernacular, helping to elucidate the communication breakdown between them as they go on a quest to find the demon and investigate its effects on people, animals, and plant life. We’re also supposed to be getting the interior lives of the characters, but the language Lynesse uses obscures a lot and Nyr’s ability to place his emotions into what amounts to a holding tank limited the insights, even as he was rationally explaining the emotions he wasn’t currently allowing himself to have. I thought this aspect of the book worked best in the one chapter where both voices are presented side by side giving the history of Lynesse’s world. But one chapter does not an excellent reading experience make.
This ended up being a two-star read for me, and I decided on that rating since I was speed-reading my way through chunks of the middle, partly because I wasn’t engaged enough but also because I had not caught on that this book should probably have come with a light body horror content warning until I was past my personal point of not DNFing because I was both invested and not interested in the details at the same time. It was a weird dichotomy because I did want to know what happened, I just didn’t want to spend any more time than strictly necessary finding out. And at the end, I still don’t know that I understood more than I would have if I had just read the last few pages and called it a day.