Some Desperate Glory

Some Desperate Glory is a space opera set after Earth's destruction. Gaea Station, home to a radical group of warbreed humans, has pitted itself against the majo race, the ones who annihilated their homeland. Without spoiling anything, the novel is a whirlwind of moral turmoil, intergalactic politics, and the Wisdom's immense power over all of existence.

Valkyr, our ornery and entitled protagonist, is tough to love but easy to understand. While there were times I wanted to throttle her for being so short-sighted and petty, I often felt she desperately needed a hug. Mags and Avi were fun characters, and I believe their presence really rounded out Valkyr's dominating personality. However, Yiso (the majo prisoner), was my absolute favorite of them all.

It took me about 100 pages to really get into the story, but after that I was hooked. The novel is formatted into five parts, and by the false peak, I couldn't put it down. The science behind the tech is wonky, fascinating, and certainly absurdist if given much thought... but it's still done with finesse and ingenuity.

I recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys space operas, crazy space tech, or complicated friendships.

On the surface, this may seem like military SF, but really, it's more about trauma, and radicalization, and cults, and personal growth. It's well-written, too. When following the perspective of an initially angry teenager as she then changes as a person, it is possible to lay things on too thick, but Tesh manages to do it just right.

This sort of shifting perspective also makes the worldbuilding of the setting interesting. The view of the novel's world is colored by the characters' biases, and how those biases shift, and those shifts play a role in the overall plot. The overall plot is perhaps a bit of the standard SF fare, but the way it is told through the arcs of the characters involved is what makes it compelling.

This book stands out in both its approach to the kind of plot and setting it employs, and also in doing what other SF novels may attempt to do, but in this case doing it exceptionally well.

What happens if you take the classic space opera format -- soldiers! weapons! aliens! humanity fighting for its very survival! -- and give it a queer, feminist, 21st century twist? You get Some Desperate Glory, that's what.

The book manages to walk the tightrope of combining hard sci-fi themes with social science fiction, and manages to pull it off in style.

(Minor spoilers ahead)

The primary character, Kyr, is a teenage soldier in the vein of Starship Troopers or Ender's Game, brought up from birth to be one of humanity's last living soldiers on a secret base where the few remaining humans have their resistance movement. So far, so expected.

But as the book progresses we see Kyr's black-and-white view of the world gradually peeled back and altered as she gains access to other, hidden and banned points of view.

Without going into too much spoilery detail, over the course of the book's 500-or-so pages we accompany Kyr on this journey of discovery and it's a fast, exciting, scary and emotional ride. The characters are well written and believable and although the plot occasionally becomes convoluted, it's well worth persevering.

From time to time, humanity is gifted the formation of a writer of such unimaginable capability and spirit that their work may reorient our past and reshape our future. Science fiction has had no shortage of such writers: Verne, Asimov, Le Guin, to name only a few — and now Tesh.

While this is her debut novel, it is obvious that Emily Tesh has refined her craft for much longer than the writing of one novel. This book is a finely-wrought masterwork with the precision and efficiency of Traviss, the soul and insight of Le Guin, and a creativity and compassion all her own. I cannot wait to delve into her prior work and to see what she creates next.

Heed the content warning at the beginning of this book, though it's not as bad as it could be. But if you have any interest in antifascist military sci-fi, in what it means to fight injustice in a hopeless world, or just a good damn book, give it a read.

And if, by some twist of fate, Emily Tesh ever reads this review: thank you. I didn't even realize there was still a Gaea inside me, and now I know what to do about it.

You’re almost certainly familiar with Kahneman’s and Fredrickson’s wonderful ice-water experiment (“When More Pain is Preferred to Less”, also called the peak-end rule), the one where victisubjects opted for a longer (90s vs 60s) painful experience if the last few seconds were less painful. I love that result. I’ve found it invaluable for reframing life situations.

This is a 436-page book, of which the first 220 or so pages are excruciating. Oh, how I wanted to toss it away! But I was encouraged to stick with it. I did. And I’m glad.

Halfway through, it took an interesting twist, and yes it was foreshadowed but no, not the directions it took after the midpoint. That was thoughtful, creative, nuanced, suspenseful, engaging, and even sweet; and it just kept getting better. A whole lot of Did Not See That Coming, even when you think you see what’s coming, and damn, I really loved it. Solid 4.5 stars, but rounding down because even with all that praise it was still objectively heavyhanded (I know, it’s YA, I should be more forgiving); because of the eyeroll-worthy dei ex machina and other wildly convenient coincidences; and finally because I can’t objectively be sure if the last half was truly-actually good or if I was swayed by the peak-end rule. What I can say is, I’m really glad to have read this and can highly, highly recommend it but only to those who promise to persevere through the first half. Tesh took a big risk in writing the book that way, and I’m sure it cost her sales and readers. If she decides to go for the adult reader market, I’m looking forward to seeing her future work.