Fiction Reviews
Some Desperate Glory
(2023) Emily Tesh, Little, Brown Book Group, £9.99 464pp, ISBN 978-0-356-51718-6
The only book to be short-listed for both the Clarke and Hugo awards (which it won) this year, and it is about fascists in space! Grappling with authoritarianism – and in doing so holding up a mirror of sorts to contemporary realities – is a long and mostly honourable tradition in SF, and it is within that that Some Desperate Glory, the first novel by Emily Tesh, is seen to best advantage.
Earth has lost an interstellar war and been destroyed by an alliance of aliens overseen by the mysterious harmonising force of The Wisdom. One generation later, most surviving humans are somewhat reconciled to this. But not so the people of Gaia Station – remnants of the military hiding out in a backwater system, subsisting on piracy and plotting revenge.
Valkyr (Kyr) is a both a young woman and a product of Gaia Station’s intense militarism and xenophobia. Among the best of her group of trainees, she is unquestioningly loyal to the regime and driven to the point of obsession. Tesh doesn’t shy away from showing Kyr at her worst in these early chapters – inconsiderate to her peers and cruel to the alien she briefly encounters.
Upon graduation she expects to be assigned duties as a pilot on the front line of her people’s war – but to her horror she discovers her destiny is in the Nursery, breeding the next generation of humanity’s future. With the help of a jaded hacker (is there any other kind?) and an alien prisoner of war, she flees Gaia Station in search of her brother, who has just left to be a covert operative on a suicide mission in alien space.
Or so she believes…
Some Desperate Glory takes many twists and turns after this, and it would be a shame if this review gave away the goods in their entirety. So, let’s just say that that the Wisdom is a device that allows its wielder to overwrite reality and the book goes on to show us several alternative timelines and leave it at that for now.
In a sense, Kyr never really leaves Gaia Station until the very end of the novel – she carries it with her in her head wherever the story takes her. Her deprogramming is the very heart of the book and Tesh shows us how the scales fall from her eyes in a way that is very gradual, rather raw and extremely convincing.
Gaia Station too is a fully realised depiction of an authoritarian cult in space – violent, patriarchal, heteronormative and racist in both a traditional and an inter-species sense. It also becomes increasingly apparent over the course of the novel that the benign facade of the Nursery, with its emphasis on maternal heroism, masks a reality of institutionalised prostitution. We might be dealing with a young protagonist, but this book is not 'young adult'.
For better or for worse (and it’s frequently for worse) all of Some Desperate Glory’s best scenes are here in this place of discomfort. And it is also true that the further from this centre of gravity it travels, moving from space opera to something a little more Philip K Dick, the less engaging the story becomes.
But I’d still recommend what is a very impressive debut novel with an intensity and a power that many in the genre would struggle to match.
Tim Atkinson
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