Emily Tesh is the winner of the World Fantasy Award Best Novella for Silver in the Wood in 2020, an Astounding Award winner and Crawford Award finalist. Some Desperate Glory is her debut novel.
From the publisher: [Some Desperate Glory is]“…a thrillingly told space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and the path you must forge when every choice is stripped from you.
All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of planet Earth. Raised on Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet.
Then Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons, and she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr must escape from everything she’s ever known. If she succeeds, she will find a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could ever have imagined.”
It’s not an easy thing to begin with a main character that is rather deliberately so unpleasant. Of course, Valkyr/Kyr is a product of her own environment and upbringing, and this means that she has been brainwashed from a very young age into upholding a certain point of view. The big reveal at the beginning of the book is that Kyr is a descendant of the remnants of Humanity when Earth was destroyed by an entity known as the Wisdom, and so life exists in a militaristic way towards exacting revenge on the Wisdom and the alien Majoda that are looked after by the Wisdom, existing on thousands of worlds outside the realm known as Gaea Station.
The first part of the book, dealing with Kyr and her brother Magnus’/ Mags’ life in Gaea Station, reads rather like a Baen Books/Heinlein juvenile novel in evolution – albeit one where children are trained to fight in warrior groups, discipline is fierce and forced pregnancy is accepted as important for the continuation of the human race. It is logical, ordered, disciplined and yet seen as the only means of securing human survival.
The pace picks up once Mags, Kyr, queer geek Avi and alien Yiso manage to escape Gaea and get to the planet Chrysothemis, where those humans who have left Gaea have been placed. Chrysothemis is very different to Kyr’s life in Gaea Station. After initial denial, Kyr’s life and beliefs are turned upside down by meeting her ‘traitorous’ sister Ursa, and discovering the reality of life for humans outside Gaea Station. Such a volte-face means that Kyr, her family and lifestyle are reassessed, and there is an almost Truman Show reappraisal of life outside the ‘reality’ that is Kyr’s life.
The next part of the book runs at a much faster pace. Despite all of the change, Kyr is determined to complete Mags’s aborted Strike mission, an assassination of the Prince of the Wisdom as an act of revenge for the killing of 14 billion people on Planet Earth.
Kyr then manages to get Avi to activate the dormant Wisdom node on Chrysothemis, and at this point there is a twist in the story that you may not necessarily see coming.
The rest of the novel deals with the consequences of this. Kyr finds that she can travel between multiverses, using the Wisdom as a vehicle to go back and change things – or to cause the destruction of thousands of worlds. The dilemma is then about what does she change, and by how much. Can she change things to before the Earth was destroyed? Or use it to wreak revenge on the majo?
By the end, with various plates spinning at once, Tesh manages to resolve the key issues, even if some of the conclusions are a little too convenient. There’s the odd jarring moment amongst all the good stuff – a bizarre scene involving touching hair that seems rather controversial towards the end, for example.
Although Some Desperate Glory is being presented as an adult SF book, the novel seems a little undecided on who it wants to be read by. Whilst many of the themes are determinedly grown-up – radicalisation, death, suicide, xenophobia and racism, eugenics, amongst others – I can see that it might be attractive to older young adults, especially as many of the characters would be of a similar age. Her world of set values and beliefs, and the way that it changes, may also be rather engaging to anyone who feels like an outsider.
However, the book loses points in its attempts to be an adult SF book. When used, sexual expletives and sexual talk seemed jarringly out of place in the narrative and there to serve little other purpose than to determine that this is a book for adults rather than the Young Adult atmosphere it mainly resides in.
At times I also felt that there are one too many deaths that aren’t deaths that may make the reader feel a little cheated or at lest misled, and one character too many that is saved rather than sacrificed, which may give a lesser value to such matters than a reader may expect. But in the end, Some Desperate Glory is a crowd-pleaser, determined to highlight and right the wrongs of radicalisation, xenophobia and dehumanisation, even if other elements are left discarded along the way.
As an LGBTQ Space Opera, Some Desperate Glory is good, solid stuff, even when there are elements of the science fiction that are soft on the science, a little wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey – up there with unobtanium for me. This allows the social aspects of the characters to develop, rather like those in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkoisgan series. It does what it needs to do to drive the plot forward and allow the focus to be on the characters.
Really, this is a book that lives or dies (often more than once!) on its characterisation and their respective redemptions. Whilst there are undeniable issues, Some Desperate Glory is a book that readers will remember for the depiction of its characters rather than anything else.
In short, Some Desperate Glory is an engaging LGBTQ Space Opera that ticks all of the boxes for contemporary issues in SF. It is not earth-shatteringly original, but is a solid character-driven read which builds intensity and grabs your attention as it deals with issues of radicalisation, dehumanisation, family, loyalty and revenge.
SOME DESPERATE GLORY by Emily Tesh
Published by Orbit, April 2023
448 pages
ISBN: 978 035 6521 831
Review by Mark Yon
