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Elder Race
208 pages
A clever, melancholic genre-bender that plays with the boundary between magic and science through the lens of profound loneliness.
What it feels like
Reading this novella feels like looking at a single object through two entirely different lenses, watching as fantasy and science fiction bleed into one another. The narrative moves at a brisk, engaging clip, propelled by a clever structural conceit that alternates between the mythic, earnest worldview of a fantasy heroine and the weary, technologically mediated reality of a depressed anthropologist. It is a deeply atmospheric and slightly melancholic experience, steeped in the profound loneliness of being misunderstood by the world around you. The prose is a masterclass in linguistic play, using the very limits of language to explore how we construct our realities. It will thoroughly delight readers who love genre-bending thought experiments that never lose sight of their characters' fragile, beating hearts.
- Mood
- lonely
- wondrous
- atmospheric
- tense
- Tone
- wry
- melancholic
- analytical
- earnest
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the burden of knowledge · linguistic disconnect · clinical depression and isolation · science as magic
- The writing
- Cleverly bifurcated, shifting seamlessly between the mythic, elevated cadence of high fantasy and the clinical, internal monologue of hard science fiction.
- The arc
- Moves from profound, isolated misunderstanding to a bittersweet, hard-won bridge of empathy between two entirely different worldviews.
- Who it's for
- Fans of genre-bending novellas who delight in linguistic cleverness and deeply empathetic explorations of miscommunication.
Content notes
- clinical depression
- isolation
- mild body horror
About the book
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...
Description from Open Library.
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