Booklog 11/2022: Adrian Tchaikovsky: Elder Race

[jacey]

Novella. Nyr is an anthropologist, sitting (or long-term sleeping) in his tower, after the rest of his team have shipped back to base. He's somewhat depressive (alone and abandoned) and has given up on the idea that someone will come back for him, so he's still studying the human colonists he's forbidden to help or interfere with. But he's broken the rules before, and when fate comes knocking on his door in the shape of Lyn he might have to break the rules again. Lyn reminds him so much of her now long-dead great grandmother, with whom he fell in love three hundred years earlier. That time has passed in an eyeblink for Nyr because he's been asleep the whole time. He has memories of what Lyn thinks of as ancient history.

Lynesse, lowly Fourth Daughter of the Queen, knows that the tower is inhabited by a powerful sorcerer, Nyrgoth, who once helped her ancestor. Desperate for a way to defeat a global threat, she trudges to the tower without the permission of her mother. Together Nyr and Lyn set out to defeat the entity that Lyn knows is a demon and Nyr knows it can't possibly be. Nyr is not a sorcerer, of course, but he does have some tech that might look like magic. This is told from the dynamically opposing perspectives of Nyr and Lyn, with the somewhat quirky difference between what Nyr thinks he's said in Lyn's language, and how she hears it.

 This is an entertaining culture clash novella. Highly recommended