Elder Race
A junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe. Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way. But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) and although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it). But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, for his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon…
Stats for nerds
8recommend
11mentions
10people
2022–2026years
82% recommend9% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Even as a writer of optimistic sci-fi myself, it's very difficult for me to come up with more than a handful of examples that are less than ten years old.
Becky Chambers is probably the single best young author working in this genre today. She's got two great series, one that begins with "A Psalm for the Wild-Built", and one which begins with "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet".
I'd argue Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary" is hopeful sci-fi, and the movie adaptation was great. You could perhaps put Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Elder Race" and "Service Model" in there too, since both are pretty hopeful in overall outlook. And if you broaden to include fantasy, Travis Baldree's "Legend and Lattes" series is very much in the same vein as Becky Chambers.
It seems like hopeful sci-fi movies and TV are more common, like the recent "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds".
Perhaps the recent troubles the world is undergoing will lead to more light-hearted fare to distract us? One can only hope.
- I was not particularly a fan of them - the plot seemed to find overly easy solutions to all the actual messiness that comes when dealing with others very unlike yourself, which given the rest of the stories, feels like it undercuts the entire point of them.
The Tchaikovsky novella I really like is Elder Race. Technology-as-magic is done in so many places (Ventus is another favourite), and I usually enjoy it, but I felt that in Elder Race it was pulled off in an unusually elegant way.
- I’ve read most of the SF on this list so I’ll throw out my other recommendations:
I like Chambers’ Wayfarers series but IMO Closed and Common Orbit is the best one.
Another recent book that stuck with me is Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, which is told from two perspectives as both a sci fi and a fantasy story. It’s great and a quick read.
I enjoyed All Systems Red but for whatever reason have no desire to read the sequels. Same with Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Both good stories but something about the settings just didn’t pull me in.
And I can never help but plug the Vorkosigan saga, which started in the 80s but still has a few recent books. Anyone who hasn’t read them should start with the early books though.
A Memory Called Empire is another great one that I’m actually surprised isn’t on this list.
- Tchaikovsky is probably better known for his novels (eg Children of Time) but I second your recommendation of The Elder Race. It's one of my favorite science fiction/fantasy novelas. The other one that really stuck with me and that I randomly think about from time to time (which IMO is the sign of a good thought provoking one!) is The Merchant and the Alchemists Gate, which in included in Exhalation from the list.
Edit: I'll also mention that Network Effect is my fav in the Murderbot Series, the novel length was a nice change of pace. Id avoided the series for a while because the name sounded cringy, but I'm glad I finally gave it a shot.
- Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Final Architecture” series is lots of fun. I also highly recommend the two “Bioforms” books. For standalone novels, I liked “Alien Clay” and “Doors of Eden” the most. For novellas, “Walking to Aldebaran” and “Elder Race”.
Thank you for recommending “Implied Spaces” as well. Walter Jon Williams seems like a new author for me to follow.
- "Mockingbird", by Walter Tevis. 40 years old but startlingly timely: centuries after humanity ceded all authority and responsibility to AI, the last superintelligent robot is ready to die of boredom – and one human has learned to read.
"Elder Race", by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This short novel is a bit reminiscent of Iain Bank's "Inversions" in that it combines sci-fi and fantasy through the perspectives of an anthropologist from an advanced space-faring culture and a second protagonist from the medieval world they are secretly observing.
