Emily Tesh: Some Desperate Glory (2023, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)
English language
Published April 16, 2023 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity.
They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.
Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
A thrillingly told queer space …
All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity.
They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.
Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is award-winning author Emily Tesh’s highly anticipated debut novel.
I was absolutely hooked. Our protagonist starts as being very unlikeable, but if you are willing to bear with her, it will be rewarding. There is somewhat a change of direction around halfway through, which seems a bit more generic after that. But the world building and the characters still hold up very much. All in all, really well written.
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 …
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.
Incredible pace and a depth of painful experiences that beautifully if implausibly bend towards light and attempting to right wrongs when our characters break loose and are able to reflect. Despite some structural misgivings, I loved everywhere this went.
This has a whole bunch of elements that i loved, but mostly a great plot and clear character arc. At the start of the book, Kyr is an about-to-graduate cadet on a asteroid bound space station that houses the last few thousands of humanity after an alien civilization has destroyed Earth.
Things are not as they seem, which Kyr finds out by getting assigned to Nursery to bear children for humanity, despite her top scores, and her brother refusing assignment and deserting.
A word of warning that there's some intense cult-like abuse in the pages.
I read this on the recommendation of @charliejane@wandering.shop in her Washington Post column on SF. You should read her columns too.
www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/08/nick-harkaway-bina-shah-moniquill-blackgoose/
This book really stuck with me after reading it. I had to stop reading it before bed because I would stay up too late reading it, which is a trait I cherish in a book and is also hard to pull off in a book with such heavy themes -- brainwashing, abuse, reproductive coercion, war,.... And the characters were so well articulated. I really live for books where characters seem like actual humans who are capable of being really truly horrible to each other and also capable of kindness and growth.
