The next chapter is told from the perspective of Nyrgoth Elder… and it turns everything upside down. Stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers completely, because there’s a doozy coming… It feels like the start of an epic quest, and hurray for girl power too! But Lynesse has heard refugees from outlying lands plea for help after their towns and forests were overrun by a demon, and she’s determined to take action, even if her mother won’t. Lynesse is not taken seriously by her mother or older sisters, all of whom prefer to focus on trade and diplomacy rather than indulge Lynesse’s flights of fancy. In Elder Race, Lynesse Fourth Daughter, daughter of the queen of Lannesite, takes the forbidden trail up the mountain to the Tower of Nyrgoth Elder, the revered sorcerer who has not been seen for generations. Clarke’s Third Law:Īny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This stunning, inventive, beautifully crafted novella is a living, breathing embodiment of Arthur C. Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.īut 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).īut 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… In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, a junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe.

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