Nyr Illim Tevitch is tired. Very, very tired. Tired of waiting for contact from Earth, which stopped transmitting signals centuries ago. Tired of shirking and sometimes outright betraying his anthropological duties to survey the planet without interfering with its savage inhabitants. Tired of living with the knowledge that he is quite possibly the last member of his civilization. Mostly, just, tired. But hey, here's a flimsy excuse to wake up from indefinite cryosleep and go for an outing. He's got nothing better to do.
Elder Race tells the tale of these two idiots, together with Lynesse's good friend Esha Free Mark, setting out to find and defeat the demon. Half the chapters are from Lynesse's perspective, and make up a fantasy story; the other half are from Nyr's perspective, and make up a science fiction story. It's an interesting concept, but does it hold up?
Well, it kinda depends on your priorities. If all you want is to see the juxtaposition of two perspectives which view events as science or as magic, then Elder Race absolutely delivers (especially compared to certain other science vs magic books). The technology that Nyr uses is believable as an extension of technology that we have today, and Lynesse's interpretations of these technological marvels makes sense given what she and her culture know of the world. As an exercise in seeing the same thing from two very different pairs of eyes, it succeeds.
My main complaint is with the characters. To be frank, I never really cared about any of them. I couldn't get invested in Lyn's struggle to prove herself as a princess, nor in Nyr's search for meaning in a world that has no place for him in a galaxy that has forgotten him. It's like... have you ever watched a movie and thought, "this would be really great if only it was instead a TV show"? That's the feeling I got reading Elder Race. If only the book was, like, three times its current length, maybe it could have gotten me invested in the characters and story instead of relying entirely on its (admittedly rather clever) worldbuilding.
Also, I could have done with a bit less Anthropology Is Dumb in the book? See, a big part of Nyr's situation is that, as an anthropologist, he's not allowed to speak to the people he studies, nor indeed involve them at all. He's also apparently been taught to be uncomfortably racist against the people he studies. For the first half of the book, I was worried that the author shared his mindset (oh these savages without logic or reason, the only way to be human is to have a telephone, et cetera et cetera), but fortunately toward the end it was made clear that this is a bad thing.
Again I find myself wishing that the book had just a little more time to say its piece. Just another few pages of Nyr discovering that he's a racist little prick. Just another few pages of the characters interacting with each other, making us see them as people worth worrying about. Just another few pages of chatting with people outside our band of heroes, to give the world a real sense of being lived in.
Elder Race does not have the time to do those things, and it doesn't do them. But I mean, the flip side of that is that you can get through the whole book in just one long plane ride, so it's not exactly the biggest waste of time. All things considered, Elder Race had a clever, well-executed concept and nothing more. If that's enough to make you want to read it, then you'll have a good time.
(P.S. For some reason my brain decided that the correct way to pronounce this book's title was El Derrace, as if it were a noun from a romance language. This is irrelevant to the quality of the book, but I thought it was important to note.)
