Elder Race: Clarke’s Third Law, squared

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novella & and an axiom of speculative fiction

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Up to this point, I’ve rarely touched on any widely-accepted fundamentals of the speculative fiction genre in my exploration of different novels and ideas. Discussions about the necessary formulae and elements of a piece of art always feel prescriptive to me; also the genre itself has changed massively since the era when many of these ideas were being established.

I believe the idea of [Author]’s Laws in speculative fiction is the result of mixing Asimov’s Laws of Robotics (which don’t follow the formula of the rest, applying in-fiction) with eponymous laws such as Hanlon’s Razor or Murphy’s Law. Among the most famous in speculative fiction are those three attributed to Arthur C. Clarke and more recently Sanderson’s Laws of Magic, but there are plenty accepted and/or known on smaller scales, such as LeGuin’s Law or Niven’s Laws.

So with that background out of the way, let’s get into Clarke’s Third Law and how Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote a great novella around it!