Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by ‎Tor.com on November 16, 2021

Apart from writing a couple of science fiction’s most memorable novels, Arthur C. Clarke is remembered for his observation that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Many sf writers have quoted Clarke in their fiction, but few have illustrated the point quite as deftly as Adrian Tchaikovsky does in Elder Race.

Lynesse Fourth Daughter is least respected daughter of the Royal Line of Lannesite. Her mother has dismissed her as a dreamer, a child who has not embraced trade and diplomacy but clings to old stories of sorcery and demons. It naturally falls to Lynesse, as her ancestor once did, to seek the help of a sorcerer when demons begin to plague the territory to which she has been relegated.

Lynesse sets off to see the sorcerer in the Tower of Nyrgoth Elder who, like the Wizard of Oz, is a creation of technology and imagination rather than magic. Nyr Illim Tevitch is actually an anthropologist second class who spends most of his time in cold storage. More than a thousand years earlier, Earth entered ecological bankruptcy after sending out generation ships to colonize other planets. One of those colonized worlds is Sophos 4. Lacking resources to support them, Earth abandoned the colonies to their own devices. Many centuries later, Earth revitalized itself and sent new, faster ships to the colonies, not to reacquaint them with Earth but to study their societies without interfering with their development.

The Tower is the outpost on Sophos 4 that Nyr occupies while he studies the feudal society into which the colonists devolved after being cut off from Earth. Nyr hasn’t heard anything from Earth in almost 300 years and is doubtful that anyone on Earth will ever visit his outpost again, much less read the reports he occasionally writes. Nyr is almost fine with that, given his suspicion that he isn’t much of an anthropologist. Having come to the rescue of Sophos 4 a couple of generations earlier at the request of Lynesse’s ancestor, he decides that he might as well do it again when Lynesse asks for his help.

One of the demons is a forgotten and malfunctioning piece of technology used by the original human colonists (the elder race). The more consequential demons are something else, something Nyr can’t quite understand, although he knows they aren’t demons. The story follows Nyr and Lynesse as they face the challenge in their own ways.

The story is filled with clever riffs on the theme that magic is simply misunderstood science. Nyr’s decision to break the rules and tell Lynesse the truth about her society’s origin gives rise to my favorite passage. Nyr’s story about the planet’s colonization is juxtaposed with Lynesse’s understanding of history as it has been passed down through the ages. The only difference between the two versions of the same story is that Nyr understands it to be a story of science while Lynesse regards it as a story of magic. The side-by-side recounting of the same story from two different perspectives is brief but brilliant.

Nyr is a sympathetic character. Apart from his understandable doubts that his occupation has value and his fear that he might never return home, he is ambivalent about the emotional suppressor that is wired into his biochemistry. He can turn off his emotions when he needs to make rational decisions, but he isn’t sure that his decisions are really any better when they are devoid of emotion. He eventually makes a self-sacrificing decision that would probably be the same whether or not it is influenced by emotion. Sometimes rationality and love of humanity lead to the same end, at least when people are decent.

Elder Race is a smart, thought provoking story that doesn't waste words. In the final pages, when Nyr faces a crossroads about the remainder of his life as a scientist/sorcerer, it seems clear that any choice he makes will be fine, simply because the choice is his to make.

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Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Orbit on August 3, 2021

Adrian Tchaikovsky built a detailed universe for Shards of Earth, the first book of the Final Architecture series. That universe is fundamental to the novel, but it never gets in the way of a multifaceted space opera that features creative aliens and appealing human characters.

A human diaspora led to the settlement of hundreds of worlds in the novel’s far future. As humans tend to do, they have divided themselves into factions. Most worlds colonized by humans belong to the Council of Human Interests, or Hugh. Some have followed the Essiel, an ancient alien race that has organized the Hegemony and promises protection from threats if its members will accept the Essiel as divine beings. While the Essiel generally leave species and individuals alone if they choose not to follow the Essiel, the humans who join the Essiel, being human, tend to become cultists.

The primary threat to humanity comes from inscrutable aliens called the Architects. The Architects destroy inhabited worlds. They’ve destroyed alien civilizations in the past and, a few decades before the novel begins, they turned their attention to human worlds, starting with Earth. Their ships appear out of nowhere and, using a technology that humans don’t understand, reshape planets by pulling at their cores and turning the planets inside out. They take a similar approach to the ships that attack them. The new contours of the reshaped planets and ships might be appreciated for their aesthetic value, although not by their dead inhabitants. Perhaps the destruction is a form of artistic creation, a theory that explains why humans refer to the aliens as Architects.

A group of women called the Parthenon represent a human faction outside of the Hugh. They reproduce parthenogenetically and are genetically engineered to be, as conceived by their founder, ideal representatives of humanity. The Partheni are fierce warriors but they are viewed with suspicion by humans who believe rumors that the Partheni kill male babies and want to form a superior race that will subjugate lesser humans. Whether their founder actually intended the Partheni to rule others was, at least for a time, a subject of some debate among the Partheni, but less authoritarian Partheni minds ultimately prevailed.

While the Parthenon fought alongside the Hugh against the Architects, a different breed of human provided the key to the war. A 15-year-old girl named Xavienne was able to reach into the mind of an Architect and turn its ship back. Humans tried to engineer that same ability into volunteers known as Intermediaries, killing most of them in the process. The most successful Int was Idris Telemmier. He teamed with a Partheni named Solace in the war’s most important battle.

The other primary defense against Architects are relics left on certain worlds by an ancient race known as the Originators. The Architects won’t go near those worlds. Unfortunately, the relics lose their power to deter Architects when they are transported elsewhere.

All of this is background to a story that takes place several decades after the Architects disappeared. By virtue of their engineering, Ints are able to pilot vessels in unspace. That makes them valuable even in the absence of the enemy Architects. While most humans lose their sanity (or at least their lunch) unless they sleep through journeys into unspace, Ints can withstand the discomfort. Telemmier nevertheless experiences barely suppressed horror based on his sense of a terrifying presence in unspace.

Telemmier is now piloting a salvage vessel called the Vulture God. Decades after they were last together, Solace is asked to recruit Telemmier to work for the Partheni. After proving her worth to the ship during a skirmish on an unwelcoming planet, she joins the crew so she’ll have the opportunity to make her pitch to Telemmier.

Apart from Telemmier and Solace, the novel’s primary characters are other crew members of the Vulture God. A shrewd lawyer named Kris, a factor (deal maker/accountant) named Kit, a drone specialist named Olli, and a search specialist named Medvig are the most memorable characters. Kit is Hammilambra, an alien species whose members resemble crabs. Medvig is a Hiver, a distributed intelligence that resides in cyborg insects that inhabit mechanical bodies. Olli was “born a stranger to her human body” and relies on mechanical devices for transportation (her favorite resembles an oversize scorpion). A Hiver archeologist named Trine becomes a de facto crew member when Solace needs his expertise to analyze some relics. The wormlike Castigar and symbionts called the Tothiat are among the other species that populate the universe.

The plot takes off when the Vulture God contracts to recover a missing ship. The crew discovers that the ship has been reshaped, suggesting that the Architects have returned. The crew encounters one obstacle after another when they try to bring the ship home. Various parties, including a group of Essiel gangsters and the human version of the CIA/KGB, want to seize the ship or its contents, kidnap Telemmier, or start a fight. As the reader might expect, the Architects do return, forcing a reluctant Telemmier to once again play hero. By the end, Telemmier learns something about the Architects and their mission that will undoubtedly set up the next book in the series.

In the grand tradition of science fiction, Telemmier also learns something about himself as he finds the courage and pluck to return to heroic conflict after embracing obscurity during decades of peace. He also finds that he missed Solace, having bonded with her in battle, although he doesn’t particularly trust her. Solace’s own conflict, between her loyalty to the sisterhood of Parthenon and her friends on the Vulture God, tests her in a way that will be familiar to science fiction fans.

Shards of Earth is built on a carefully conceived foundation that suggests an epic story, yet Tchaikovsky never lets the story get away from him. He balances the big picture with interpersonal conflicts, making it possible for the reader to relate to the characters, even if they aren’t the sort of cyborg insects who live next door. I wouldn’t say that the far future is so different from the present that it represents a brilliance of imagination, but the story is satisfying, the characters have distinct personalities, and the true nature of the Architects presents an intriguing question. I look forward to learning any answers Tchaikovsky decides to provide in the next novel.

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Ironclads by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by Solaris on November 7, 2017

About 20 years after Brexit, England becomes an American territory, giving the U.S. a convenient military base and a stepping stone to Europe, where ideological conflicts are translating into military conflicts, primarily with the Swedes and Finns, collectively known as the Nords. Sgt. Ted Regan and his two buddies (Sturgeon and Franken) are asked by a corporate Scion to find the Scion’s cousin, who disappeared on the front, the weaponized armor that encased him having gone dark. Since the military does whatever powerful corporations ask, the three grunts are separated from their assignments and sent to the front where they will carry out a rescue mission.

They are joined by a Brit named Lawes and a corporate tech guru named Cormoran who flies drones and hacks systems. Eventually they’re joined by a Finnish bioweapon named Viina. Needless to say, the mission is quickly FUBAR and the reader is treated to some battle scenes that are more intelligent than those served up by typical military sf. The soldiers struggle along until they discover just why they were tasked for this seemingly impossible mission.

Apart from the usual tech that attracts readers to military science fiction, there are some clever ideas here, including the notion of breeding and releasing millions of little bugs to block satellite views of troop movements and defenses. This is a relatively short, fast-moving novel, that tells an uncluttered story. Characters are adequately developed and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s prose is sharp.

The point of Ironclads is that most modern wars (and presumably future wars) are fought to advance corporate interests rather than national interests, and that politicians and military leaders are easily manipulated by corporations. That point has been made by other science fiction writers in more detail than Ironclads, but the theme is a good one, and it gives the entertaining story some bite.

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