Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

[sophia_sol]

It's for moments like this that I work my way through the Hugo lists every year: that feeling when I pick up a book I probably would never have otherwise bothered with, and discover that it is actually 1000% my thing. This book! This book!!!!!!!!!!!

It is a book about the struggles to communicate between people of very different cultures and experiences and frameworks for understanding the world, and about what happens to a colonized planet that is no longer in contact with the rest of the universe, and about being haunted by your past, and about trying to do things and believe in things and make a difference, and about the importance of human connection and the stories we tell. It's beautiful and fascinating and emotional and so, so good.

Highly recommended!!

(also...the Dragonriders of Pern books were my first and most formative exposure to the notion of a planet colonized and then abandoned, and interacting with the technology left by the original colonizers without understanding it -- so throughout the book I kept on being inescapably reminded of how much I once loved the Pern books, except this book is uhhhhh actually good, unlike Pern, lol)

Comments

[lirazel]

WOW SOLD. (I have yet to try a Tchaikovsky book that really works for me--though I've only tried like 3--but I am sure that one will eventually, and this one definitely sounds like a contender!)

[mific]

I really liked this one too - Clarke's Law embodied. It's up there with his other two faves of mine - Children of Time and Children of Ruin. Those two are a bit more sci-fi without the fantasy edge. Not that Elder Race is fantasy, but it feels a little that way because of how the scientist is perceived.

[chestnut_pod]

Okay, if someone had previously tried to sell my on Tchaikovsky by saying, "it's like Pern, but good," I would have been there with bells on ten years ago!!

This sounds fantastic and I'll have to try it out.

[applenym]

so throughout the book I kept on being inescapably reminded of how much I once loved the Pern books, except this book is uhhhhh actually good, unlike Pern, lol

This might be what tips me over into actually picking up an Adrian Tchaikovsky book instead of vaguely thinking "I should check out his work; I'll get on that one of these days..." I loved the Pern novels when I first read them as a kid in the 80s. I don't think I could re-read them again now, but I'll always remember how much they meant to me then.