Elder Race offers an extended meditation on Clarke’s Third Law, some thoughts on cultural contamination that are not new but are important to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s characters, all wrapped up in a fast-paced adventure of swords and sufficiently advanced technology. The novella is set on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humans during the first interstellar flowering of Earth’s civilization, when generation ships were sent out into the cosmos. That effort proved unsustainable on humanity’s home planet and starfaring stopped, leaving the colonies to fend for themselves. Much later, a second wave of exploration began with the mastery of faster-than-light travel.
Nyr, the first-person narrator of half of Elder Race was part of that second wave. As he puts it, “My name is Nyr Illim Tevitch, anthropologist second class of Earth’s Explorer Corps. I am centuries old and light years from home.” (p. 25) He was part of an expedition to Sophos 4 that observed the colonists’ descendants and sought to understand their cultures and developments without letting them know that they were being observed. The inhabitants of Sophos 4 had lost all of their advanced technology, retaining only myths of an origin from across the seas of night. Some of the colonists had been modified to breathe water as well as air, and these traits had become inheritable. Nyr’s expedition aimed to understand these changes, too, and what had happened in the generations since the first arrivals. At some point in the study, Nyr’s fellow scientists were recalled to Earth, and he was left to mind the store for what they thought would be a brief hiatus. Something happened, though, and they have not returned although centuries have passed. Even communications have stopped coming. Nyr is stranded, alone with the machines that were designed to study the planet, and which support him through many decades of stasis.