“This isn’t justice. This is just the same thing over and over.”
It’s rare to find an author who writes across genres to equal success, but Emily Tesh is that author. As a huge fan of the nature-rich prose and tenderness of her Greenhollow novella duology, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Some Desperate Glory, a hefty space opera.
What I got was one of my favorite books of all time.
I wouldn’t hesitate to call this one of the definitive sci-fi novels of the year. Tesh is undeniably a versatile talent, and she translates her trademark ache and heart to an interstellar epic with effortless elegance. This is space fantasy that’s expertly true to form while also fundamentally critical of its mainstream ethos. Her thoroughly imagined worldbuilding interrogates the myths of western excellence and human superiority, the warmongering that defines our eras, and how easily we slip into factions of well-intentioned, ill-advised morality. Some Desperate Glory is a nuanced, accessible odyssey of deeply personal revolution and the half-thankless work of hope.
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Some Desperate Glory
Kyr is one of the best soldiers of her year on Gaea Station. She’s a warbreed, genetically engineered to develop with the best physical attributes to avenge Earth after it was murdered by the alien species known as majoda. Along with everyone else on Gaea, Kyr’s devoted to destroying the majoda. Gaea decries the humans who’ve made peaceful homes for themselves on the colony planet Chyrosothemis as cowards and traitors. The majoda have a reality-altering weapon known as the Wisdom, and humans lost to it once. Kyr has committed her life to ensuring it doesn’t happen again, even if it means everyone in her mess loathes her ruthless adherence to Gaea’s protocols. Everyone on Gaea is raised in competition to become the perfect warriors for Earth’s defense, though few Kyr’s age feel as strongly as she does. But when they finally receive their assignments, for the first time, a Gaea decision doesn’t make sense to Kyr. What they choose for her and her brother Magnus feels like a mistake. A misuse, a waste. It’s this that makes one of Gaea’s greatest trainees doubt at last.
Because if they’re wrong about this, what else are they wrong about?
As Kyr embarks on a treacherous mission to save herself and her brother, she makes unexpected allies, and discovers truths more powerful and personal than she ever could have imagined.
At its core what makes Kyr’s story hit so hard is that this is a book about the work of deradicalization. It’s not easy to craft that story in a fun, surprising way, but Tesh does. The result is something that feels classic to the genre while also fresh and unapologetically anti-war. I’m a hard sell for a book that centers a soldier realizing they’re maybe not on the right side—because it so often is apologia, because as a reader I feel no need to put myself in the shoes of someone who’s been towing a xenophobic, militaristic party line, no matter how believable the shift. I know what horrors “righteous” violence has wrought. Tesh makes it work because she wrote the book with that understanding as a baseline, because she knows the white male imperialist canon that’s shaped a lot of mainstream genre conceits. Kyr’s arc is so believable and thorough, it hits all the notes I hoped it would and ones I didn’t expect.
I’m not going to spoil plot points aside from what can be gleaned by the summary, but I’ll share that it feels like this book is in conversation with conventions of the genre such as Ender’s Game. How fucking delightful and satisfying, as someone who grew up being taught those books as an unassailable part of the canon, to read something that does everything Card does, but with an intentionally conscious eye toward white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and transphobia. What a relief, honestly. I laughed aloud with joy at how well some of this was executed. Tesh gets at how desensitized we are to child soldiers, to empire. How easily we normalize the horrors of war, valorize its sacrifices in the name of something faceless and intangible to which we are meant to pledge allegiance. How cultlike, the way we other our enemies as barbaric, inferior, inhuman. How swift to decry ways of life unfamiliar to one’s own as an inherent threat, one that justifies any and all means of war in the name of a peace perpetually, needfully out of reach. Because the inherent dogma in a militaristic autocracy is that peace is weakness. And so bigotry cloaks itself in righteousness and the propaganda perpetuates. To question authority is denigrated as treason, as cowardice, as selfishness, even though in times of war there is no greater courage.
“No one told me they were people,” Kyr realizes. It’s easier to believe the enemy is lying to you than to realize you are the enemy in someone else’s story.
This is a story about unlearning and relearning, building your morals yourself from scratch once you’ve understood the magnitude of the lies you’ve been told. It’s not an easy thing, that deprogramming—it needs to be deliberate, it necessitates humility. You want to believe the suffering you’ve endured is for something. It’s easier, to falter. It would take so much less energy to just be what they made of you. And of course it’s not a neat escape—Kyr takes Gaia with her, she can’t not, and she has to learn who she is outside of it. And then she has to learn how to live as that person. Every page is earned here, as Kyr chips away at everything she’s ever known, and Tesh makes her readers feel the deliberate effort it takes.
They made a brilliantly powerful, brutally logical weapon out of her. They made Kyr to fight, serve, and die for what is right. To enact justice. That was their mistake, that was their own downfall—they succeeded. Kyr was more brainwashed than any of them. A true agent of the state. Which means she’s got one of the biggest grudges, and the capacity to turn one of their most powerful weapons against them—herself.
Here’s your awakened stormtrooper. You can’t change corruption from within, but you can use what you know of it against it. The system is weaker and smaller than they want us to believe.
Every element of this novel is a deeply satisfying subversion, and the characters are no exception. Every character is a mess of morals. Morality is as flexible as scale and context here, and Tesh expands and contracts the focus with interstitial world building. Nonhuman points of view begin the novel and punctuate throughout, granting well-timed perspectives that throw everything into question. Family dynamics—found and otherwise—twist and sever. Siblinghood and sacrifice take on new meaning.
Most of these characters are just children in the end, young people trying to do right in a universe no one knows how to live in yet, just after the end of Earth. Again, I’ll resist spoiling, but Tesh wields several tools of the genre so artfully I found myself grinning in delight. This is an impressively mature and nuanced novel, a breathtaking puzzle box that hits hard and pulls no punches. It’s fun as hell and masterfully twisty: accessible, epic, and profoundly human.
Some Desperate Glory is published by Tordotcom Publishing.
Read an excerpt.
Maya Gittelman is a queer Fil-Am and Jewish writer and poet. They have a short story forthcoming in the YA anthology Night of the Living Queers (Wednesday Books, 2023). She works in independent publishing, and is currently at work on a novel. Find them on Twitter (@mayagittelman) or Instagram (@bookshelfbymaya).
I’ll have to give this a second look. Saw it at the library, read the paragraph of trigger warnings and just wasn’t feeling something this intense.
This book was so good. Absolute hands-down the best book I have read this year. Thank you for the excellent review.
@1, the trigger warnings are real, but at least for me something about the narrative momentum pulled me past them. It’s not the kind of book that wallows in the things the trigger warnings are there for.
Exactly. Honestly the trigger warnings made me read on, simply to find out how a book could have that many but not turn into a nightmare of grimdarkness. (Astonishingly, despite the almost robotic unlikeability of the protagonist at first, it is not a nightmare of grimdarkness.)
@2 Thank you! It’s going back on the list. I appreciate your feedback.
So it’s “The Road to Damascus” crossed with “Are we the baddies?” and a little bit of Harlan Ellison’s “Soldier” … okay. Sounds promising.
But didn’t Greg Bear write the first half of this in a series like 30 years ago? The difference being Bear’s vengeful survivors weren’t the baddies who deserved what they got?
I am a little surprised at the dismissiveness of the comments here. Yes, this isn’t a brand-new idea. There really aren’t entirely new ideas; just twists, reimaginings, etc. Yes, pieces like Ender’s Game have dealt with these themes before and I imagine that as long wars we have war, other artists will tackle them again. What matters is the quality of the execution. The reviewer thinks the execution is very high based on the review and isn’t that the point of this kind of review?
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Yes, pieces like Ender’s Game have dealt with these themes before and I imagine that as long wars we have war, other artists will tackle them again. What matters is the quality of the execution.
What matters also is what it brings to the table that’s new.
“Hyper-capable child soldier learns to question the moral basis for the war he fights and realises that the enemy are people too” is the story of Ender’s Game (and Ender’s Game also did it while making some pretty blunt points about misogyny, ableism, white supremacy etc). If this is a new version of Ender’s Game with really nice writing, then that’s one thing – and if you liked Ender’s Game then this is clearly the book for you. I liked Dracula and if there was a really well-written book about a powerful vampire sneaking into modern England and being thwarted by a band of mismatched heroes, I’d probably like that too. But it would still basically just be Dracula wearing a different hat.
But Some Desperate Glory would be a better book if it doesn’t just write Ender’s Game again, but takes the basic idea and puts a new spin on it.
From the review, I’m not sure that it does. If there’s something fresh here, some new development building on a classic, I would like the reviewer to say so, but she doesn’t. I can tell that she really liked the book but I’d like to know whether I would.
I think one can say that the deprogramming method used is one that could never exist outside science fiction. Even inside it it’s hard. You could do it with mind uploading and virtual copies of people, I suppose. (This book uses an even more wondrously gonzo method.)
I ended up reading the entire book in one evening because I couldn’t just leave Kyr like that–“like that”, in this instance, meaning “literally on any page of the book”. I got angry at her, I cried for her, I said “you IDIOT” out loud more than once, and at one point had to set the book down and take a few deep breaths because I knew what was about to happen and that it was going to hurt. She’s an amazing protagonist in that the reader identifies with her 100% whether or not they actually like her.
The system is weaker and smaller than they want us to believe.
God, yes, and the minute Kyr felt that, I felt it too.
I read this due to a previous tor.com review, and had a somewhat different reaction. ISTM that Tesh loads up the Gaia command with every vice she can think of (as if their pigheaded, vengeful militarism wasn’t enough) and stacks the deck in other ways; I found it less than plausible that the all-powerful Wisdom couldn’t find a better way out of this than destroying Earth and letting Gaia fester.
Well, yes, except, that she then goes on to show that most of Gaea’s command staff are knowingly complicit but not irrecoverable. (As for why the Wisdom picked blowing up earth, well… the Wisdom is really a wild misnomer; it merely simulates, it makes no decisions, and it leaves all of those to a tiny pool of very old majoda. It’s plausible to assume that they saw the variety of fairly dreadful outcomes when the Earth was left to its own devices and panicked…)
The excerpts posted here prior to publication were engaging and the novel more than lived up to my expectations. I join in your enthusiastic recommendation and will be looking for more by Emily Tesh. However, note that Kyr is initially “toeing” the party line, not “towing”, with her gradual awakening to how she’s been lied to a key aspect of the story.
What a fantastic novel. I saw this review, I bought the book, and finished it in one glorious rainy day.
Like the other commenter, I just couldn’t put it down. I don’t care if it’s a twist on an old frame. It’s fresh, well written, and beautifully paced.
Some of y’all are just unfun and hypercritical. I’m glad we don’t know each other in real life.
Just started Emily Tesh’s first novel. Thanks for the intro to a new author!
I loved, loved this book. As someone who grew up in fundamentalist evangelicalism, in a politically active conservative family, it hit HARD. I’ve never seen the process of deconstructing and deradicalizing portrayed so accurately and thoroughly – and somehow it’s also a really enjoyable, enthralling read?! It’s simultaneously compassionate and also unflinchingly honest about what isolationist, authoritarian communities create in the children they raise.
Anyway! I don’t want to give the impression that it’s just a Message Book!! That’s definitely not the case. It’s got twists and turns and great characters and really solid, immersive set-building. The pacing is very good (there’s a point midway through where it just goes… what’s a way to say “off the rails” but it’s a good thing??? And the last act is genuinely propulsive.), the character arcs are well drawn. Romance isn’t a big part of the story, but queerness IS.
Anyway, such a good book and I’ll definitely reread! Also – I’m very easily put off by narrators, but the audiobook was really good and I enjoyed Sena Byers’ delivery of the characters a lot. Always happy to find one I enjoy!