Emily Tesh: Some Desperate Glory
May. 8th, 2025 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
A christmas present from
cahn, which I finally had the time to read. I really liked it. First novel by this particular author for me, certainly not the last.
Genre wise, it's a space opera with a brand of dystopia, including tropes like groundhog day (sort of), enemies to friends, found family and others. Our pov character is Kyr (short for Valkyr), and as opposed to characters like, say, Katniss in The Hunger Games, who also grow up in a totalitarian regime, Kyr starts out in this novel as 100% indoctrinated. (To stay a moment longer with the HG comparison, as a career, not as someone from the other districts.) What she believes to be the case at the start: after humanity has lost the war against a non-human species and Earth has been destroyed, the brave human resistance has carved out a life on Gaia station, training their young to one day wreak vengeance. It's a thoroughly militarized society (consisting of a space station and a few battleships; there are other humans, who are presented as either living under the yoke of the aliens on other planets or being willing collaborators) and teenage Kyr wants nothing more but to fight in its service. Until her brother gets send on what comes across as a clear suicide mission while she gets told to serve in the "nursery", because reproduction is completely regulated as well, of course, and she's more valuable breeding lots of future soldiers than just being one. At which point Kyr doesn't question her teachings yet, but she is so horrified that she runs away (telling herself it's just to save her brother but later realizing it was mainly to escape her own designated fate), not alone, but with a recently captured alien prisoner and this universe's equivalent of a computer genius, Avi(cenna).
I really appreciated that Kyr doesn't have just one enlightenment moment - if you grow up the way she did, it takes longer than that -, that sheer self preservation and her love for her brother might be enough to start that journey, but it takes a lot more, and one of those things is the ability to see non humans as people. (Not least because I always thought that was key to any genuine change from fascist to non fascist mindset. Fascists can be self sacrificial - in fact, most totalitarian states teach that to be a virtue, to sacrifice yourself for the regime -, and loving basically the sole person who at the start of the novel has genuine affection for her is also not the equivalent of deprogramming. But realising that someone who is not like you, who doesn't belong to whatever group you've grown up with, who is in fact part of the group you've been taught to despise and hate deserves to live the same way you do, and no, not as the one exception but that this is true for others as well - THAT is genuine change, and Kyr reaches it one third in - but at a point where it seems it's too late. Except it isn't, because of the other tropes this book employs.
Another thing that Kyr learns is the way others see her, and that they have reason to do so. Like I said; in the Hunger Games, she'd be a Career at the start of this story. And not just because she wholeheartedly believes, because in addition to pushing herself to supersoldierdom she is also pushing the kids around her, bullying them in drill seargeant manner. But the novel isn't content to show the way growing up in this kind society warps you if you're physically strong enough to fit with the soldier ideal but how it warps you if you're very intelligent, not suited for athletics but still grow up in a death cult. Avi is such an interesting counterpoint to Kyr, not least in the choices he makes in all three stages of the book.
And lastly: at first, when we got into the second stage of the book, I was wondering about two things: whether what had just happened wouldn't rob us of the earlier character journey (it didn't, and the way it didn't also meant we got to examine another character and relationship from a different perspective), and whether it didn't leave the thing with the main villain unresolved (definitely not). There are some trapfalls with this particular trop that the novel avoided, and once I saw that, I was all in for the remainder.
All in all, a suspenseful, well written sci fi novel from an author I was glad to be thus introduced to.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Genre wise, it's a space opera with a brand of dystopia, including tropes like groundhog day (sort of), enemies to friends, found family and others. Our pov character is Kyr (short for Valkyr), and as opposed to characters like, say, Katniss in The Hunger Games, who also grow up in a totalitarian regime, Kyr starts out in this novel as 100% indoctrinated. (To stay a moment longer with the HG comparison, as a career, not as someone from the other districts.) What she believes to be the case at the start: after humanity has lost the war against a non-human species and Earth has been destroyed, the brave human resistance has carved out a life on Gaia station, training their young to one day wreak vengeance. It's a thoroughly militarized society (consisting of a space station and a few battleships; there are other humans, who are presented as either living under the yoke of the aliens on other planets or being willing collaborators) and teenage Kyr wants nothing more but to fight in its service. Until her brother gets send on what comes across as a clear suicide mission while she gets told to serve in the "nursery", because reproduction is completely regulated as well, of course, and she's more valuable breeding lots of future soldiers than just being one. At which point Kyr doesn't question her teachings yet, but she is so horrified that she runs away (telling herself it's just to save her brother but later realizing it was mainly to escape her own designated fate), not alone, but with a recently captured alien prisoner and this universe's equivalent of a computer genius, Avi(cenna).
I really appreciated that Kyr doesn't have just one enlightenment moment - if you grow up the way she did, it takes longer than that -, that sheer self preservation and her love for her brother might be enough to start that journey, but it takes a lot more, and one of those things is the ability to see non humans as people. (Not least because I always thought that was key to any genuine change from fascist to non fascist mindset. Fascists can be self sacrificial - in fact, most totalitarian states teach that to be a virtue, to sacrifice yourself for the regime -, and loving basically the sole person who at the start of the novel has genuine affection for her is also not the equivalent of deprogramming. But realising that someone who is not like you, who doesn't belong to whatever group you've grown up with, who is in fact part of the group you've been taught to despise and hate deserves to live the same way you do, and no, not as the one exception but that this is true for others as well - THAT is genuine change, and Kyr reaches it one third in - but at a point where it seems it's too late. Except it isn't, because of the other tropes this book employs.
Another thing that Kyr learns is the way others see her, and that they have reason to do so. Like I said; in the Hunger Games, she'd be a Career at the start of this story. And not just because she wholeheartedly believes, because in addition to pushing herself to supersoldierdom she is also pushing the kids around her, bullying them in drill seargeant manner. But the novel isn't content to show the way growing up in this kind society warps you if you're physically strong enough to fit with the soldier ideal but how it warps you if you're very intelligent, not suited for athletics but still grow up in a death cult. Avi is such an interesting counterpoint to Kyr, not least in the choices he makes in all three stages of the book.
And lastly: at first, when we got into the second stage of the book, I was wondering about two things: whether what had just happened wouldn't rob us of the earlier character journey (it didn't, and the way it didn't also meant we got to examine another character and relationship from a different perspective), and whether it didn't leave the thing with the main villain unresolved (definitely not). There are some trapfalls with this particular trop that the novel avoided, and once I saw that, I was all in for the remainder.
All in all, a suspenseful, well written sci fi novel from an author I was glad to be thus introduced to.
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Date: 2025-05-08 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-08 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-08 10:40 pm (UTC)Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood Academy and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school's boundaries from demonic incursions.
"Walden is good at her job―no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. And it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from―is herself."
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Date: 2025-05-09 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-09 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-12 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-08 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-08 08:43 pm (UTC)Hope she writes more. To date, I think Tesh has only written a couple of novellas, completely different to Some Desperate Glory.
*checks the internet*
But she's releasing a new book next Tuesday!! Joy.
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Date: 2025-05-09 05:03 pm (UTC)So I think you did not grow up (as I did) with Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game absolutely dominating adolescent-SF spaces. (As an aside, I don't particularly recommend it to you in 2025 -- it was a very formative book for me at the time, and I still love it, but a lot of it is a product of its time, the 1980's.) -- The first few chapters are very reminiscent of Ender's Game with a female protagonist, to the extent that I was very surprised to find out Gaea's actual status in the universe (in a way that I think was much less surprising to those who didn't have Ender's Game as a formative book).
But realising that someone who is not like you, who doesn't belong to whatever group you've grown up with, who is in fact part of the group you've been taught to despise and hate deserves to live the same way you do, and no, not as the one exception but that this is true for others as well - THAT is genuine change
YES. THIS. ALL OF THIS
Avi is such an interesting counterpoint to Kyr, not least in the choices he makes in all three stages of the book.
AVI
I understand that Tesh has a Classics background, and of course there are things like the agoge and so on -- did it strike you as something written by a Classics person? (Not that it should or should not have, I'm just curious since obviously I'm not a Classics person!)
I wrote a bunch of words about this book because I had a lot of Feelings about it:
my first post, which says a lot of the same things that you're saying in your review
Lin Yuletide fic, because both
Avi fic immediately post-canon, because of discussions with
my second DW post, which has spoilers for "Dulce and Decorum Est"
I also wrote a short Wisdom fic.
I also want to rec
I will say that Tesh's published novellas before this were... okay? Not nearly to the level of SDG, which absolutely bowled me over. But the novellas are very different from SDG, which is something I think is very cool (I always love to see authors doing different things). I'm so excited to see what she does next, though!
(She also used to write fic, though when she went pro she orphaned it all. My favorites are this Arthurian one, and you probably have even read this horror-themed Bacchae fic.)
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Date: 2025-05-10 05:58 am (UTC)No, I haven't read Ender's Game, despite having been a teenager in the 1980s, but I did osmose enough to know what it is about and the big twist. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, my first association for Gaian society in the first third of the novel or so was with Prussia and the way growing up in a society like that warps you. Though to be fair to FW, for all his gazillion faults, I don't think he'd have mutinied in the first place. Both because he deeply believed in the chain of command and authority (see also: him giving his father the funeral F1 wanted despite disapproving of every part of it) and because for all his soldier fetish and creation of a society (which Prussia hadn't been before) where everyone was drinking the military cool-aid, he actually wasn't into wasting his soldiers on suicidal attacks and continuing a war already lost. The wars Prussia participated in during his reign like the Great Northern War or the War of the Polish Succession, it didn't start and participated in due to alliances. Basically he was a different type of tyrant. But yeah. He did create a cool-aid drinking society where not achieving soldierly glory, not sacrificing yourself for King and Country was the deepest shame, etc.
Classics background: didn't strike me in particular. I mean, allusions like Cleo's full name aren't more than general pop culture knowledge, though I was also reminded of the Spartans (in their ghastly true form, not the one glorified by Zack Snyder) with Gaean society, so perhaps that.
I did in fact read the Bacchae fic back in the original Yuletide day! It was fantastic!