Elder Race

She is a fourth daughter of royalty with no hope of advancement in station, determined to invoke the promise of aid given to her ancestor generations ago by a powerful wizard when her mother refuses to engage a demon threatening the kingdom.

He is a long-lived exo-socialogist, sent to observe these people but not interfere. He broke that directive once before, many years ago, and now another of them has shown up at his outpost door...

I've never seen a story play with Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") like this before. Each chapter alternates POV between the two main characters, so it is half science fiction and half fantasy. Sometimes the same events are told both ways. The story is interesting on its own, but told this way it also becomes a lesson on empathy and understanding.

It surprisingly also became a story about severe depression, persevering through grief and trauma, methods of self care, and how mental anguish can appear from the POV of both those suffering and those around them.

And that will always endear this story to me.

Arthur C Clarke famously once wrote that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and this story is the living embodiment of that, presenting the idea from both perspectives. I enjoyed how the book regularly switched between those perspectives, showing how conversations were perceived differently by the protagonist who controls the technology and his more primitive, magic-fearing counterpart. The struggle to communicate is one of the themes of the book.

Besides that, this is a book that also tries to deal with the concepts of loneliness and isolation, and the profound depression that can spring from this. I found it interesting that the book depicts a technological solution to these human problems, but one that is deeply flawed.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot. It's not action-packed, nor is it full of intrigue or plot twists; it prefers to focus instead on the thoughts and feelings of the two main characters. I didn't find it as gripping as some of Tchaikovsky's other work (e.g., his excellent Children Of Time series), but it was a thought-provoking and very worthwhile read nonetheless.

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.