Briardene Books

One of the panels I particularly enjoyed at the Glasgow Worldcon was “What are reviews for? Balancing critique, recommendation, promotion and the art of criticism in the written review”, for which Graham Sleight moderated a discussion with Liz Bourke, John-Henri Holmberg, Paul Kincaid and Roseanne Pendlebury (full details here). At one point, the panel turned to that hardy perennial debate, how far one should venture into spoiler territory, or even whether spoilers are meaningful at all; they discussed Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons, which turns on a final-act revelation, and whether the power of the novel changes or is diminished on second and subsequent readings. It occurred to me, in the audience, that Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, which has now won the Hugo for Best Novel, makes a contemporary test case for the debate, since it involves not just one but a series of narrative trapdoors and revelations. How far into the novel is it fair to describe? How far is it necessary to describe to pin down why the novel works? Personally speaking, I find the debate a little confected. I think there are some straightforward approaches that apply in most cases. I think that reviewers should begin by respecting the difference between first and subsequent reading experiences, but that they should reserve the right to go deep into the book if their analysis requires it; and I think that readers should be aware of the type of review they are entering into and accept that, in general, longer pieces are more likely to reveal more of a book’s detail. As a worked example, below is my roughly 2,000-word review of Some Desperate Glory, which first appeared at the end of last year in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (issue 146, specifically). Compare and contrast where the line is drawn in reviews by: Roseanna Pendlebury (March 2023, at Nerds of a Feather); Alexandra Pierce (March 2023, in Locus); Jake Casella Brookins (April 2023, at Chicago Review of Books); Maya Gittelman (September 2023, at Reactor); and Abigail Nussbaum (October 2023, at Asking the Wrong Questions).

“If you could hear,” wrote Wilfred Owen during World War One, “at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs […] you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory / The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori.” Whether or not we immediately bring this poem to mind on reading the title of Emily Tesh’s first novel (I didn’t, despite having it drilled into me at school), it becomes clear in the first chapter, when some ardent children repeat the lie with total sincerity, that it’s not a reference made lightly. Moreover the rest of the chapter, which expertly deploys other references and resonances, makes clear that we will also be asked to think about how the lie is made to work. We meet Kyr while she is training, attempting to beat a simulation of the day several decades earlier when an alien warship destroyed the Earth. She fails, as she has several hundred times before. Later, we learn that the scenario is designed to be impossible to win, and we might think of the Kobayashi Maru; but where Star Trek‘s famous test is intended to evaluate cadets’ ability to make ethical decisions under pressure, here the purpose is to sharpen their desire for vengeance. “We have all failed”, Kyr’s commander tells her. “But Earth’s children endure.” Kyr completes the catechism: “The enemy shall fear us” Not for nothing is the system on which the scenario runs called the agoge, the name of ancient Sparta’s training and indoctrination programme. Gaea station, where Kyr lives, is the base from which the last of humanity will strike back in the ultimate just war: this is what she has been raised to believe. Kyr is a teenager.

She’s also smart, capable – a genetically enhanced “warbreed” – hostile, and a blunt instrument bulldozing her way through the narrative. Her vigour reminded me a little of the irresistible force of Nyx from Kameron Hurley’s God’s War (2011) and subsequent Bel Dame Apocrypha stories, albeit Kyr is rather more oblivious to the effect she has on others. One of her fellow cadets, Cleo, makes the point – “I wish I could just not notice things like you do” – drawing our attention, if we hadn’t already noticed ourselves, to the fact that the close-third camera eye following Kyr’s gaze around Gaea is missing, or choosing not to process, important details. Things like: how her twin brother Mags is feeling and why. (He asks her if she knows a slightly older technician called Avi. “Oh, the queer one?”, she asks. “Sure, the queer one”, he replies.) Or things like: what an alien captive is thinking. (“Kyr couldn’t read its expression very well but she thought it was resigned. That made her angry.”.) Or things like: what the male cadets say when they watch Kyr and Cleo sparring. (“There was a burst of cheering and, strangely, a shout of laughter. [Cleo’s] expression had gone cold and flat”.) It’s not subtle, even without the referential title, terminology and names (Kyr is short for Valkyr). There’s no question that Gaea is an unpleasant place structured by an unpleasant ideology, and that Kyr is an expression of its success. We are also primed to be sympathetic to the aliens when Kyr watches a classified broadcast from outside Gaea, fronted by a non-binary human journalist that Kyr’s brain struggles to fit into a binary identity, shifting from “he” to she” as she watches. We wait for some incident to bring enlightenment, to turn Kyr’s furious energy back on Gaea and burn it down.

This opening is enough to demonstrate that Some Desperate Glory, which follows two well-received but relatively less ambitious folkloric fantasy novellas, is an accomplished jump to space-operatic science fiction. In addition to Hurley, it’s easy to make comparisons between Tesh’s approach and that of writers such as Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers and Arkady Martine – which is to say that Some Desperate Glory joins the distinctively contemporary strand of militaristic space opera that has accounted for at least a third of every Hugo Award Best Novel shortlist for the last decade. It’s a bit surprising that nobody has yet tagged this cluster of work with a label that’s stuck, and I don’t have any immediate suggestions, but I think some common characteristics can be identified. [Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology, New Adventures in Space Opera, highlights both the continuing lack of a label and the sense that there is a cluster to be discussed. — 2024] Novels in the cluster usually follow a single protagonist closely, and that protagonist is likely to be, in some way, a person who has not often been at the centre of the story. But they are not typically a loner, or not for long: they aggregate to themselves a found family, similarly marginal, with attendant bantering. And the plot is less likely than in previous generations to feature massive feats of engineering, but is very likely to feature massive feats of politics, in that most of these novels critique – or at least are fascinated by – large-scale mechanisms of political organisation, most notably empires. Some Desperate Glory ticks all three boxes, although it does also feature a massive feat of engineering, and – interestingly given that Tesh, a Brit, is one of the few non-American writers to be identifiable with the cluster – only marginally addresses empire. Gaea might wish it were an empire, but it’s more like North Korea; and the alien society is big, and powerful, but hard to describe as conventionally imperial.

One other characteristic of recent space opera novels is, to put it as neutrally as possible, the balance of comfort and challenge that they offer. Perhaps the aspect of Some Desperate Glory I admire the most is the evenness of the balance it strikes. It leans strongly into the found-family narrative, and Kyr, Mags, Avi, Cleo and others are all brightly sketched, and bounce off each other well. Yet it only ever offers us Kyr’s viewpoint, and it commits absolutely to Kyr’s awakening as a process rather than a moment. We wait in vain for an incident to spark enlightenment, and instead are offered a series of incidents in which she is infuriatingly close to getting it: a very delicate balancing act, executed with precision. Take her initial realisation of the injustice of Gaean society. When her class of cadets graduates and are assigned new roles, she is astounded and humiliated to learn that – not even despite, but allegedly because of her demonstrated excellence – she has been detailed to Nursery, where she will be expected to continuously bear children to build Gaea’s strength. Meanwhile, Mags has been dispatched on a suicide mission, which she is horrified by not on general principles, but because it is purely dedicated to causing civilian casualties, and won’t achieve any meaningful strategic objective. Command can’t be wrong; but here is Command making two wrong decisions; obviously they must be related. So if she “corrects” Mags’ mission, she can save his life and demonstrate her value to the cause in one fell swoop. It’s a beautifully constructed moment, eminently logical within its terms, and it leads to Kyr righteously breaking out of Gaea, with Avi and the alien captive in tow, for all the wrong reasons.

Not every step feels quite as organic, it has to be said. In a review of Ann Leckie’s 2023 novel Translation State published in The Los Angeles Review of Books (28 June 2023), David M. Higgins muses on the use of pronouns across Leckie’s work and points out that, “although pronouns might seem like a small affair to some […] the refusal to acknowledge someone’s gender identity is always a deeper disavowal of their personhood.” This is entirely correct, and yet the way Some Desperate Glory deploys Kyr’s use of pronouns – in particular with respect to Yiso, the alien captive mentioned above – as a marker of her ability to recognise personhood feels too mechanical. From the deliberately depersonalising it used in the quote earlier in this review, Kyr progresses to he when she allows herself to think of Yiso as a kind of animal (but, explicitly, not yet a person), then on to they as she grudgingly accepts Yiso as an ally (but still not a person), until, finally, she cannot deny to herself that “she knew them” and that Yiso is a person – and that therefore by extension, so are other aliens. Obviously these are good realisations to have, but their regularity and the transparency of intent behind them gives the sense of a character levelling up in pre-ordained bursts.

Yet ultimately even this strand of argument has a valuable pay-off, related to the fact that the wider universe, when Kyr steps out into it, in some ways confounds our expectations as well as hers. The most striking revelation (Kyr never doubted this, of course, but I did) is that it turns out to be true that aliens destroyed the Earth. They did so on the authority of a system, or possibly an entity, known as the Wisdom, which appears to be capable of legitimately identifying “the greater good”, in a utilitarian sense of the greatest good for the greatest number. And in this case the death of fourteen billion humans was judged to be outweighed by the predicted harm that warlike humans would cause to trillions of aliens from several dozen species. The weight of that action gives rise to Some Desperate Glory‘s most challenging quandries, shaping the second half of the novel into an extremely satisfying marriage of idea and action, asking us to think about how societies make decisions, and creating what appears to be another no-win scenario. How can there possibly be a reasonable resolution to the twin problems of Gaea and of Earth’s destruction? The answer – to come back to the pronouns, sort of – resides in moving beyond mere recognition of identity to doing the work necessary to understand the perspectives that arise from those identities. Kyr’s breakthrough is to know Yiso; Yiso, who turns out to have a connection with the Wisdom, has to accomplish the reverse. And why does the Wisdom take an interest in Kyr?

“Maybe because I like you. [said Yiso.] But I think mostly … for a different point of view.”

“Because Valkyr has such a unique and interesting perspective on the universe,” said Avi.

“Of course,” Yiso said. “Everyone does.”

“Wow, how deep,” Avi said with heavy sarcasm.

Avi’s sarcasm is necessary, given Kyr’s unpleasantness – although it’s important to note that the plot is constructed such that Kyr hasn’t really had a chance to do anything truly unpleasant, only to think it – but Yiso’s point is simple, unarguable, and difficult to grapple with. Everyone does have a unique perspective; and everything that is unique is worth understanding. And perspectives can change, and while change is not necessarily quick, and perhaps never complete – a few pages earlier, Kyr wrestles with the “seed” of Gaea inside her, and the fact that “just because Kyr was looking for it now didn’t mean she’d find it every time”; and a few pages later, she is tempted by a desperately understandable desire for the world to be simple again – it can be meaningful. Even so, even so: while agreeing with Yiso’s point, I wondered at first whether Tesh pulled her punches at the very end of the novel, wondered whether the escape from the old lie was a little too easy. Perhaps the agoge that is sf has sharpened my taste for vengeance; perhaps I don’t have enough sympathy for those that have been raised with lies. Perhaps I just struggle with the fact that the solution to a no-win scenario remains the same as it always has: cheat. It is at least true, and for me welcome, that the catharsis we’re granted comes with a bitter aftertaste, and I hope it’s allowed to linger. Which is to say: I very much hope that Emily Tesh writes more books like Some Desperate Glory, and I very much hope they are not sequels. [I’m getting my wish: The Incandescent is a standalone fantasy, out next June. — 2024]