Review of Some Desperate Glory

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Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory takes a classic science fiction premise and scrambles it. What if there was an all-knowing artificial intelligence that could help us decide which actions would be serve the most people? What if we had a calculus for the greatest possible happiness? Valkyr—or Kyr—a young woman and warrior for humanity, lives in the shadow of just such an intelligence, an ultra-powerful, reality-bending force called the Wisdom. The major problem? Humanity did not invent this superpower, and the civilization that did, the majo, follows the Wisdom’s advice to destroy the Earth. Kyr is a warbreed, a genetically modified weapon for humanity’s revenge, born on Gaea Station decades after the death of her planet. She is a special favorite to her mentor and the station’s de facto leader, “uncle” Aulus Jole, and a clear frontrunner for a glamorous assignment in one of the combat wings. When assignments arrive, however, Kyr finds herself placed in Nursery, the child-bearing and rearing sector, a wing with all the fatality of combat but none of the glory. Reeling from this shock and the defection of her twin brother, Mags, Kyr takes the ultimate risk and leaves Station Gaea to prove herself and to find out the truth about her place in the universe.

Some Desperate Glory is Tesh’s best-selling first novel, following Silver in the Wood (2019) and Drowned Country (2020), the two novellas of the Greenhollow Duology that marked her dark fantasy debut. In a departure, then, from her previous works, Some Desperate Glory employs many of the familiar elements of high concept science fiction: a young hero with a singular goal, an alien enemy, and a slew of new combat-driven technology. Yet, the initial set-up belies the narrative’s complexity. Some Desperate Glory expands into a tale of manipulation, where coming of age includes shattering a worldview on multiple fronts and in multiple universes. Like many young heroines, Kyr learns that her world and her place in it could have been otherwise; furthermore, she is allowed to live the alternatives, in a fragmented and sweeping narrative that allows the reader to enjoy multiple facets of Tesh’s deep world-building.

Reminiscent of Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man (1995), Some Desperate Glory takes two wildly conflicting worldviews and smashes them up against one another, with interesting implications for gendered representation. While gender roles on Gaea are so strict as to control literal lifetime assignments, the majo have an entirely different understanding of physiology and procreation. What makes Some Desperate Glory a uniquely queer tale is the gendered deconstruction that comes from both the humans central to the novel and from an outsider’s perspective. The majo have a difficult time understanding Gaean concepts of gender and must puzzle over what they’ve learned about human physical markers to tell them apart. Majo themselves use agender pronouns to make themselves legible to humans, but they don’t seem to use these words to describe themselves in other contexts. On Gaea, there is no recognized form of life partnership, and sex is, ostensibly, reserved for reproduction, focused on meeting the station’s population targets. Queerness, then, is something Kyr can’t seem to properly process. Two of the girls in her mess are known to kiss and couple off, but Kyr doesn’t understand what is so important about “a sex thing;” to her, romantic attachment means distraction. As long as it doesn’t get in the way of Gaea’s operations, it’s harmless and unimportant. These multiple views—represented in Kyr, her companions, and a majo interloper—constantly collide to refresh Kyr’s worldview, providing constant revelations that alter her perspective.

While Some Desperate Glory is concerned with gender inequality and reproductive decision-making, it is unlike more common reproductive dystopias. Kyr’s concern is not primarily for her own fate or the fate of any potential children she might have; rather, as Kyr discovers the depth of the deception surrounding her, her greatest goal is to shut the system down altogether. Some Desperate Glory has all the brutality of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) or Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) and a similar pre-occupation with how birth and controlling leadership can circumscribe a life. The novel, however, reserves a special place for tenderness and community where little would seem to exist. Finding the capacity to turn a novel about militarization into a tale of friendship, collaboration, and daring, Tesh crafts a unique story, which is as mind-bending and fast-paced as it is enjoyable and kind.

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Sarah Nolan-Brueck is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California where she studies how science fiction interrogates gender. Currently, she is researching the many ways science fiction authors critique medical legislation that restricts diverse gendered groups in the United States and how the genre collaborates with activism in this arena. Sarah was recently awarded the University of Oregon’s 2024 Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship. She has been previously published in Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, the SFRA Review, Femspec, and Huffpost, and has work forthcoming in Utopian Studies and ASAP/J.