Some Desperate Glory
by Emily Tesh
Summary
Kyr has spent her whole life on Gaea Station, a military rock crewed by the last few thousand humans. She is the best cadet of her generation, bred and drilled for war, contemptuous of weakness, and entirely certain that the vengeance she has been raised for is worth every life on the station including her own.
Then she is assigned to Nursery rather than combat, because the commander needs children more than soldiers, and her brother is sent to die in an operation designed to kill him. So she runs.
What follows takes the reader somewhere the opening does not promise. Kyr learns what the war actually is, what her people have been doing, and what her own certainty cost the people around her, and Tesh puts her through a reckoning rather than a redemption. She is unlikeable for a long stretch on purpose, and the novel is entirely aware that she has been radicalised by a grief cult with a flag.
There is a substantial reality altering device in the middle that some readers find a cheat and others consider the point, since it exists to show Kyr the lives she would have had.
The people around her are drawn precisely: a brother who worked out the truth years ago and said nothing, a cadet Kyr bullied for being insufficiently committed, and an alien intelligence that is far more interested in her than she is comfortable with.
Around four hundred and fifty pages, fast, angry and much warmer at the end than at the start. Expect a first hundred pages spent inside a genuinely repellent worldview, told without authorial commentary, which is the technique working rather than the book endorsing it.
Best for readers who want space opera that takes fascism seriously as something people are recruited into rather than born with, and who can wait for a protagonist to become likeable.
Historical Context & Significance
Some Desperate Glory won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel at Glasgow Worldcon, and was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel.
It was Emily Tesh's first novel. She had come to notice with the Greenhollow Duology, two short fantasy novellas, and the leap from quiet English woodland fantasy to a military science fiction novel about indoctrination surprised most of the people following her.
The title comes from Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, the poem that calls the old line about dying for your country a lie told to children eager for glory, which tells you exactly what the book intends to do to its heroic opening. Tesh teaches classics in London, and the novel argues with the epic tradition rather than borrowing from it.