Hugo 24 Novel: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Like a lot of book-hungry readers of science fiction, I read Ender’s Game in the mid-1980s and, on balance, enjoyed it. The book was clearly packed full of problems (a child systematically bullied and isolated so that they will be the master tactician/strategist behind the total elimination of an alien species) but it wasn’t hard to read the book as implying in multiple ways that this was bad rather than celebrating the whole scenario as kind of cool. By the late 1990s, if you were online you’d meet people who had also enjoyed Ender’s Game and genuinely saw the whole thing as kind of cool rather than as a rather grim (but well-paced) dystopian tale. Taking utterly in isolation from its immediate sequels and its author (which arguably work in different directions) I suppose the book still has that aspect to it. Is it a from-the-inside-out critique of militarism and the idea that all things are permissible in the face of an existential threat or is it actually a kind of defence of genocide, where the fact that we are shown Ender regrets and feels empathy for the aliens he destroyed is there just to underline the thesis that intrinsically good people can/should commit mass murder.

Of course, the book doesn’t exist in isolation. Orson Scott Card’s increasingly bizarre and reactionary public views help clarify what kind of book Ender’s Game is. If readers had doubts at what Card’s thinking his 1996 novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is an even more contrived attempt to engage with the idea of redemptive views of historically genocidal people. It isn’t enough to give a clear answer as to what kind of book Ender’s Game is supposed to be because I suspect even Orson Scott Card doesn’t know that. It is a book of deeply confused ideas in which Card attempted to resolve his own personal and political contradictions that happened to hit a spot of ambiguity that launched his career and gave an impression of him being a more subtle writer than he actually was.

But what remains is an interesting idea for a science fiction book, one that looks at militarism, indoctrination and extremism from the inside out. A book that looks at children/young people bred and trained for a war for humanities existence but one that understands the intrinsic abusiveness of the concept.

In Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, humanity has set out to explore the stars and in the process encounters a large and benevolent society of alien species living largely in harmony. This is terrible news for all concerned because rather than being the plucky apes adopted by Vulcans in the Star Trek universe, humanity turns out to be equivalent of the Klingons crashing into other societies with our violence. Indeed, it turns out humans are bigger, stronger and more hardy than the aliens they encounter and humanity is unwilling to abide by the conventions of the multi-species society they are colliding into. War ensues and in that war Earth itself is destroyed (for reasons that don’t become clear until deep into some major twists in the novel.

Deep in space a radical remanent of humanity’s military maintains a space station assembled out of the ragged remains of Earth’s space fleet. The older generation are the veterans of the war but the station itself is populated by younger people, many of them tailored by eugenics for war. Here, humanity breeds, trains and indoctrinates the people who will avenge the destruction of billions of people. Their cause is just but their numbers are few.

Tesh, introduces this world through the eyes of Kyr, a young woman who is close to the end of her training to become an elite warrior ready to do what it takes against the oppressive Majoda. Kyr is an absolute true believer in the cause and one of the most accomplished fighters in the simulator where battle scenarios can be played out like a brutal video game. It is this drive to be the best that ultimately is her undoing. When she learns that rather than being deployed to kill aliens she will instead be allocated to the breeding program to birth another generation of human super soldiers, her loyalty to the cause is tested.

From here, it is hard to describe the rest of the plot. Suffice to say, Kyr’s limited perspective on human history is a deeply skewed view of the universe. However, the genocide against Earth is real (well…OK…reality is going to have some issues as the novel progresses but the atrocity wasn’t a lie or disinformation, the aliens did destroy Earth for reasons that, again are not easy to explain without revealing too much of the story).

Kyr’s journey takes her away from the space station to a planet inhabited by humans who now live peacefully under Majoda rule. There she has to confront painful truths about her own history and her family and the reality of her upbringing being one of systematic (and systemic) abuse.

I’ve seen a few reviews call this a space opera and it sort of is but it is perhaps better to think of it as quite a different book that happens to exist in a world in which space opera-like stories can happen (something that it has in common with Ann Leckie’s Translation State). There are questions here about historical political causes and questions about abuse. There are also plenty of fast-paced action sequences as well as some weirder concepts about reality and alternative futures.

I was deeply impressed by how well the novel manages to hold itself together with the multiplicity of themes and new perspectives on earlier events. Well paced and with a set of characters who reveal depths as the story takes some genuinely radical turns.

This was the last of the Hugo Best Novel Finalists I read and it 100% deserved a finalist spot. It probably isn’t going to be my number 1 pick but if it won Best Novel it would be an excellent choice and certainly made me have a long think about my choices.