![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lynesse Fourth Daughter is an insignificant princess determined to save her kingdom from a threat it doesn’t believe in by awakening the ancient sorcerer Nyrgoth Elder.
Nyr Illim Tevitch is a depressed, physically modified anthropologist who put himself into cryogenic sleep after he never got picked up by his colleagues from his post on a lost colony planet.
Together, they struggle with culture shock, extreme language barriers, and Nyr’s clinical depression to fight an alien or possibly a Lovecraftian horror.
Elder Race is a very fun novella which puts some new spins on old ideas. Nyr uses a dissociation module to escape from his depression and self-hatred; he and Lynesse never quite get on the same page in terms of language, so she only understands what he’s saying in terms of her own cultural lens for it. He's in a science fiction story about a lost colony, and she's in an epic fantasy. (At one point, delightfully, the story splits into separate columns so we can see what he says and what she hears in side-by-side comparison.) Their enemy is suitably horrific, and their relationship is touching.
There are, shockingly, almost no bugs.
It’s very good as is, but it suggests so many fascinating things that don’t get explored at all that I wish it was a full novel.
Nyr Illim Tevitch is a depressed, physically modified anthropologist who put himself into cryogenic sleep after he never got picked up by his colleagues from his post on a lost colony planet.
Together, they struggle with culture shock, extreme language barriers, and Nyr’s clinical depression to fight an alien or possibly a Lovecraftian horror.
Elder Race is a very fun novella which puts some new spins on old ideas. Nyr uses a dissociation module to escape from his depression and self-hatred; he and Lynesse never quite get on the same page in terms of language, so she only understands what he’s saying in terms of her own cultural lens for it. He's in a science fiction story about a lost colony, and she's in an epic fantasy. (At one point, delightfully, the story splits into separate columns so we can see what he says and what she hears in side-by-side comparison.) Their enemy is suitably horrific, and their relationship is touching.
There are, shockingly, almost no bugs.
It’s very good as is, but it suggests so many fascinating things that don’t get explored at all that I wish it was a full novel.
