Critical Death Theory, first draft: complete.
The problem with going to book festivals is that you buy books. Books that then get added to your TBR pile and sit there mutely demanding to be read. The Cymera festival was no exception. Worse yet, I attended a panel with three authors entirely unknown to me. They were so funny and engaging, I had to buy their books. Had to!
Anyway, having taken a final (for now) liberty with my TBR pile, here is my take on the last of them: Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a work of fiction that has a bibliography at the back but, then again, Emily Tesh is a schoolteacher in her other life, so perhaps it makes sense. And when one considers that the bibliography refers the reader to treatises on North Korea, fascism, and the Spartans, it makes more sense still. Because, right there, you have the baseline themes that make Some Desperate Glory (itself a quote from the (anti) war poet, Wilfred Owen) such a stunning book.
Tesh’s hero, Kyr, is a teenage girl who lives aboard Gaea Station, a small out-of-the-way place that houses the last human resistance to the majoda, a confederation of alien races that, after a long and bloody conflict, brought humanity to its knees by destroying Earth. Although there are human survivors scattered throughout the universe, they live under the aegis of their conquerors. Only on Gaea are there humans still willing to take the fight to the enemy.
Outnumbered as they are, the humans on Gaea, Kyr included, are prepared from birth for the waging of war. Everything, their education, their organization into small, tight-knit cadres, even their free time, is geared toward creating the perfect soldier. Otherwise, Gaea will be overrun and humanity lost forever. Why a hollowed-out asteroid of 2,000 people would present any kind of military challenge to a civilization that cracked open Planet Earth like an egg is not a conundrum that occurs to her, such are the narrow confines of the world Kyr lives in.
It is only upon graduation, when Kyr is assigned to a role that makes a mockery of her training scores, that she begins to question the rightness of the world she lives in. Coupled with her brother’s departure on a one-way mission that makes no military sense, she is moved to disobey orders and leave Gaea Station, determined to strike a blow for humanity that will really count for something. Unfortunately for Kyr, the wider universe turns out to be nothing like she’d been led to believe, propelling her on a path far different than the one she’d imagined.
Some Desperate Glory is one of those books that leave you thinking about it long after you have returned it to the bookshelf. It is layered and deeply intelligent and, while written from an unashamedly progressive viewpoint, manages to tell its story without jumping up and down on a soapbox or descending into tokenism. What is humanity’s role in the wider universe? Should humanity come first? Does it deserve to come first? Does the question of humanity’s future really matter — even if you, yourself, are human? There is much to consider here as the book presents Kyr with a series of momentous choices. I’m not at all sure that Kyr’s choices would be the reader’s choices. And it is that, above all, that makes this excellent book such a haunting one.