2023/145: Some Desperate Glory — Emily Tesh

“They’re people,” she said. “The majo. You know they’re people.”
“So what?”
“This isn’t justice. This is just the same thing over and over.”[loc. 3729]

Kyr (short for Valkyr) is a warbreed, genetically engineered to be a warrior. She, and a couple of thousand other humans, inhabit Gaea Station, continuing the fight against the alien Majoda confederation who destroyed Earth and murdered fourteen billion people. Gaea Station is no place for rest or recreation, or love, or friendship. Kyr is desperate for approval from Admiral Jole, who she calls 'uncle', and she adores her brother Magnus, whose scores are the best in Gaea's history. (They don't talk about their traitor sister Ursa, who fled to the colony planet Chyrosothemis.) She isn't interested in 'sex things' or kissing. She tries to look after the Sparrow mess -- the only female group in their age cohort: eight teenaged girls -- pushing them to be the best they can be. She doesn't need them to like her.

Which is a good thing, because Kyr is deeply unlikeable for the first few chapters of the novel. She's been thoroughly indoctrinated, raised as a child soldier, growing up in an environment where sexism and homophobia are rife, violence is valorised and 'population targets' legitimise reproductive rape. Kyr's fine with that. She loathes the aliens, the majo: her life is dedicated to vengeance for the murdered billions of humanity.

Then the Sparrows' assignments arrive, and Kyr finds that she is not, after all, to be a warrior. Worse: her brother has been sent on a suicide mission. Obviously someone somewhere has made a mistake, because Kyr is certain that she's destined for greater things. She's the pinnacle of Gaean humanity, the ultimate weapon against the majo. It's time for Kyr to break the rules, and to enlist the help of genius Systems tech Avi to bring her brother home.

Kyr has a great deal to learn, about herself and about the universe, about the majo and their mysterious Wisdom -- a powerful AI that can, perhaps, alter reality -- and about the people (human and otherwise) who she encounters in the course of her journey. She comes to realise that perhaps the majoda (a blanket term for several species of alien) were right to regard humans as aggressive, territorial and a threat to other intelligent life. She even, to some extent, begins to understand and accept her own emotional responses. She's still a monster in some respects, but she's capable of change.

Some Desperate Glory is told wholly from Kyr's point of view (though the 'Kyr' or 'Val' viewpoint character is not, due to alternate timelines, always exactly the same person), and it's a testament to Tesh's writing that Kyr is a compelling character throughout, capable of compassion as well as courage, willing (eventually) to accept that much of what she was raised to believe is wrong. Sticking to her viewpoint, though, does mean that we only see the other characters through her somewhat blinkered vision: her messmates, in particular Cleo and Lisabel, are depicted wholly through their relationships to Kyr, as is Avi (who's in love with Magnus). Surprisingly, the healthiest relationship in the novel may be that between Kyr and Yiso, a majo. An alien. (I liked Yiso a lot.)

There were points at which I found Kyr's lack of emotional intelligence -- and basic observation skills -- frustrating, and I'd have liked more clarity about the role of the older generation of Gaean's in the conflict before the destruction of Earth. I also felt that making the villain a sexual predator, on top of their other crimes, was excessive. But I loved Some Desperate Glory, and Kyr's self-discovery, and the hope of redemption and deradicalisation. This is a very different work to Tesh's previous fantasy duology, Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country, but told with as much flair, invention and detail. More science fantasy than hard SF: more social SF (Le Guin's term, mentioned by the author in her afterword) than either.

PS: Hurrah for British authors! I laughed aloud at this, purportedly from Federation and Other Problems: An Introduction to Human Political Thought, 3rd ed.: "The fact that some important decisions (such as, for example, the initial declaration of war against the majoda) are left to mass plebiscite should not be taken as evidence of democratic rule. Humans themselves will cynically point out that no popular vote is ever taken unless those in power already know what the answer will be."