Some Desperate Glory is the first full length novel by Emily Tesh, who broke onto the SF/F scene with her Greenhollow duology of novellas (Silver on the Wood/Drowned Country) and wound up winning the Astounding Award for best new writer. I really liked those novellas, although maybe not as much as the rest of the Hugo voters, and this first full length novel - switching to Space Opera this time - has been receiving crazy plaudits from other authors I follow on social media. So I decided - even with a way too long TBR as it was - to put a library hold on it and it came in pretty much immediately.
And well Some Desperate Glory deserves its plaudits in spades, although it's often a very difficult novel to read due to its triggering subject matter (see below), especially at first. The novel starts out seemingly as what readers probably will have seen before - a dystopian future world featuring child soldier protagonist Kyr in a future where Earth has been destroyed after a war with aliens, and will certainly feature its protagonist realize she's on the wrong side and switch sides (or not switch sides and slowly become more tragic) - and then by the midway point in its second act shifts WILDLY, with a couple of plot twists that drastically shift this novel completely. The result is an absolutely excellent story, with an excellent main character - as well as some other side characters - and surprising but generally well earned plot twists that explore strong themes really well - themes such as radicalization, how abuse leads to further cycles of abuse even from people who know what happened to them was wrong, cycles of violence, hatred and fascism, and more and more. It's an absolutely impressive novel given how much it is able to do with its characters and themes while constantly subverting expectations.
NOTE: Despite the age of its protagonist and some of its themes, the book is not marketed as and shouldn't be referred to as YA.
TRIGGER WARNINGS: I'm just going to mostly quote for the novel's own trigger warning here: Sexist, Homophobic, Transphobic, Racist, and Ableist Attitudes, Sexual Assault - both off page and on page, although it doesn't get very far on page - forced pregnancy, violence, child abuse, radicalization, genocide, and suicide. As you can tell, this book deals with serious themes and topics, but it never does so gratuitously, even if it results in the book, especially in the beginning, being very hard to read.
Plot Summary:
Valkyr (aka "Kyr") has always known she and her brother Magnus were special. The pair of them are warbreeds and are the best of their mess in terms of martial skill, with the two of them both able to complete even the highest level simulated missions in the Agoge. All except for one simulation: Doomsday, the mission based upon her commander's failed attempt to stop the alien Majo from destroying Earth and almost all of humanity. Doomsday occurred years before Kyr was born, and Kyr has been raised on Gaea Station all her life to be the best of a new generation of warriors which will take revenge for the billions of humans lost. And Kyr knows that her performance will merit her a place in one of the frontline wings, where she will be able to take the fight to the hated Majo and their unstoppable technological power - the seemingly omniscient system known as the Wisdom.
So when Kyr finds herself assigned not to a fighting wing, but to the Nursery where she will instead be forced to bear a child every two years until she dies, Kyr can't believe it. And when she learns that her brother has been assigned to a suicide mission to take out a Majo diplomat, she is further shocked. Desperate to prove herself worthy of the destiny she once believed, Kyr does the unthinkable: goes rogue with the help of a queer tech named Avi and a majo captive Yiso in an attempt to help her brother fulfill his mission without losing his life, so they can both come back in glory. But when Kyr finds outside of Gaea Station is a world where humanity is not as poorly situated as she was led to believe and the aliens themselves are not exactly the horrible monsters she was bred to fight.
And even worse, Kyr will discover that the people closest to her, including her brother, her traitor sister, and her beloved uncle, are not quite who she thought they were....and when these revelations lead to a potential new disaster, Kyr will be forced to make a desperate choice to try to make things better in a way she never could have imagined before.....
The first act of Some Desperate Glory plays out like many a novel I have (and most readers likely will have) read before: a young adult/teen protagonist grows up under a fascist sexist, homophobic, and racist military force who teaches them to believe in their own superiority, who clearly is brainwashed/radicalized and working for the real bad guys, and, after things don't go as they expect, be forced to team up with another group/alien species they hate and slowly will discover that what she knew isn't the truth and will of course turn around to try and fight for good. And this story builds like many dystopian novels that are hard to read, with Kyr being painfully naive about the horrors of the world around her, where girls can't advance as far as boys and two girls in a mess are assigned to forced breeding ("Nursery" assignment) where they are forced to bear kids until they die (at a mortality rate that is far higher than people like to talk about). Where queer individuals are shunned and outcasts, even as they exist in secret, and where everyone is pressed into learning how to fight, even those who might instead be kindly and peaceful at heart, and eugenics is openly practiced (although not called that) to produce the right type of warriors...especially if those warriors look like the dominant (white) race. This type of plot can be well done, and is of course hard to read, but it's something that has been done before and well, I wasn't really looking forward to reading another one of these novels, even if they certainly can have merit.
But while Some Desperate Glory has many common themes with those narratives, its second/third act swings it in a wildly different direction...first as one character who would normally be a misunderstood and good ally to our protagonist turns out to be something wildly else and then as the story takes a twist that suddenly changes EVERYTHING and results in some crazy different fourth and fifth acts. And the story uses those twists (which I'm not spoiling here), and Kyr's character arc, to really examine not just the horrors of sexism and racism and homophobia, but also the cycles of vengeance and violence and suffering that occur in wars and conflicts and, most significantly, the traumatic and perpetuating experiences of radicalization. Kyr and several of the other Gaea-born characters come from a world where they have been taught that their miserable existence is the result of the alien's genocide of their people, and that vengeance is all that is what they could have left. For people like Kyr, that has led her to care only for violence and fighting, to take as much revenge as possible for the 12 billion lost, with no regards for who might get in her way. It has led her to be a sucker for praise from her superior, her Uncle, and to do anything more to get it and to not consider that there is any possibility for her other than glory and success. But even for others who aren't as naive as Kyr and might even known that some of the narrative is bullshit, it still leads to traumatic experiences on their psyche where they have it imprinted upon them that the only response that there can be to the pain they have suffered is more violence, since its all that has been impressed upon them. As one character tells Kyr at one point - Gaea will always be a part of all of them, no matter how much they learn or try to change themselves, and it will always be something there within them coloring their thoughts and actions.
It's a fascinating plot arc and character development, as Kyr sees people who she both grew up with and grew up envisioning as monsters in very different ways from act to act, with it transforming her from a person who agrees that suffering is the only possible response to her own suffering to one who realizes that there has to be another way. And it's done in such a freaking impactful and impressive way. The plot isn't perfect - Kyr goes from a true believer even in spite of revelations at one point in Act 2/3 to realizing that her conception of the Majo is wrong kind of quickly, with us not really seeing how the effect of a simulation slowly builds her down as it surely must have. But even that little quirk is easy to overlook and the book wraps itself up in a truly satisfying way. A true contender for awards and a definite Must Read if you can stand the trigger warnings.
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