“Elder Race” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Rating: 4/5 Stars

An interesting tale that starts out like a fantasy story of a lowly Princess asking for the aid of a wizard to fight a demon. But when the viewpoint switches to that of the wizard, we learn that he’s actually a very lonely off-world anthropologist studying the culture on a colony world and despairing at getting contact with his own home world.

In a collision of culture and world-views about magic and technology indistinguishable from magic, they (and a few others) would forge a bond as they confront the demon, which the wizard assumes is ‘just’ a local bully with advanced tools scavenged from the colony’s initial technological days. But both would learn that the demon is more than it seems and some magic may be that: magic and not just advanced technology.

Resolving the problem of the demon may be anticipated by attentive readers, but the ending is still a nice touch as the relationship between the Princess, the wizard and the culture he is studying would change.

Book read from 2022/06/06 to 2022/06/13