Winner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory plays around with some familiar tropes of sci-fi and fantasy, including the teenager who turns out to be the ‘chosen one’ and the idea of the multi-verse, spinning them into a fast-paced and often mind-bending story about fascism and totalitarianism. It’s uneven in several ways, and while I think it ultimately landed (pun intended) in a good enough spot to recommend it, it has a lot of first-novel vibes and I think author Emily Tesh took some shortcuts that weakened her main point.
The novel opens with a scene from a simulation where the protagonist, Kyr, is reliving the moment when the Earth and its 14 billion inhabitants were destroyed. Kyr lives on Gaea, a space station that houses most of the remainder of humanity, and whose leader, Admiral Jole, was the sole survivor of the assault on Earth. Gaea is a militaristic society where everyone on board is assigned a specific role for life to help preserve the colony’s existence and prepare them for some sort of revenge plot against the Wisdom, the interplanetary authority that called for Earth’s destruction. Kyr is part of the oldest cohort of young women still waiting for assignment, which could be to the Command group of soldiers, to the Agricole group responsible for growing food for the colony, or to Nursery, which means you’re sentenced to a life of continuous pregnancies. There are also rumors of a terrorist unit called Strike, where you may be called upon to commit suicide in an attack against the enemy. The enemy is the Wisdom, which is a massive artificial intelligence that chooses the option that produces the greatest good for the least harm in its estimation, and it is run, in a vague sense, by a species called the majoda … and early in the novel, Gaea captures a majoda ship and takes a hostage.
Kyr is a “chosen one” within this framework – her life and future turn out to be incredibly important to the fate of Gaea and humanity as a species – and up to a certain point, the plot unfurls like that of a YA novel. She’s the center of all of the action and she’s forced to grow up too soon and make some huge decisions that will save or doom all of humanity … but is she forced to do so by the circumstances, or the needs of the author? When she makes her first big decision, the outcome is about as predictable as a sunrise, only further underscoring the YA-ness of the story to that point. (Saying a novel is reminiscent of young adult fiction isn’t an insult per se – I have enjoyed quite a bit of YA fiction and am reading such a trilogy right now – but when a novel is ostensibly written for adults and descends to YA levels of plotting or character development, that’s a negative.)
It’s only after that point that Tesh turns Some Desperate Glory into a real adult novel, one with strong political undertones and some complexity around its protagonist. The Wisdom has access to other universes, more in line with the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics than the sloppy multiverse we’ve seen too often in contemporary fiction, and Tesh uses that to great effect here to force Kyr to consider not just her actions but her motives and values. What begins as a quest for vengeance on behalf of fourteen billion humans turns into a much more difficult quandary that calls into question the power and limits of free will.
Kyr, which is short for Valkyr, experiences about as much development for a sci-fi protagonist as I can remember. Some of that is inherent in the nature of a teenaged main character upon whom adult decisions are thrust, but in this case, Kyr has to undergo a change of mindset, acquiring a whole new set of morals and values to replace the hollow ones that Gaea indoctrinated in her. It’s a form of humanism, although one of the targets of her newfound empathy for sentient creatures is not human, so it’s more built on a respect for all sentient life and the recognition that those we were told are Others are, quite often, a lot like us.
The political leanings here aren’t hard to catch, and even if you did, Tesh lists some sources in the acknowledgements that would make it clear, such as histories of the North Korean dictatorship and other books on fascism and totalitarianism. There is also some similarly unsubtle commentary on gender roles and gender politics, and queer identity in a society built around a rigid gender binary. The Wisdom itself is a futurist’s dream of AI, and this is where Tesh does show some real nuance, as the Wisdom turns out to be very different than the ruthless killer Kyr believes it to be, and the reasons why other sentient races have chosen to follow it are at least rooted in sense, even if Kyr can’t see it at first.
I was on Some Desperate Glory’s wavelength form the end of that first big section almost all the way to the finish, but at that point I think Tesh chickened out and didn’t allow for a conclusion that was either realistic within the book’s environment or that suited the characters and their various arcs. Your mileage may vary. I do recommend the book, even despite that disappointing finish, but I can see so many ways it could have been more.
Next up: I’m just past halfway through Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable YA trilogy.