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Book notes - Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh
I finished Some Desperate Glory last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. A quick summary: the protagonist is a highly trained / brainwashed teenager in a militarised fascist state based on a slightly terraformed asteroid. They regard themselves as the last true humans after Earth was annihilated in a war with sundry alien species - they are aware in a vague way that in fact other human colonies and individual groups remain, but regard these as traitors who have sold out to the enemy. Their own duty is to seek revenge by any means necessary, and avoid any suggestion of contamination by renegade groups of humans.
So the story basically follows the protagonist as for various reasons her simplistic world view starts to unravel, leading in the end to the abandonment and destruction of the asteroid enclave, and the start of a process of reintegrating with the rest of humankind. It's firmly in the space opera camp, with vast machines, galaxy-spanning action, and the attempted destruction of billions of lives (both human and alien).
Emily's reading list credits include studies of 20th century fascism, North Korea, Scientology and the Spartans, and these influences certainly emerge in her presentation of the asteroid culture - at the same time both logical and compelling, and oppressive and revolting. In many ways it's an all-too-credible portrayal of how a society can control its own members, and seek to eliminate divergences from its own defined norm. (In passing, she's a British writer who studied classics and humanities and now teaches Latin and Greek to schoolchildren. She's won awards for some fantasy novellas before but this is her first full-length novel).
There are a couple of places where you get a reset into a couple of (kind of) parallel universes, and the contrasts between these are a big part of the personal journey of the protagonist. One of the key threads in all the sections is how it's much easier for us to empathise with the suffering of an individual, than with the suffering of vast numbers of people.
I loved it - it's perhaps a little bit long but it would be hard to decide what should be trimmed, and I was never at any risk of giving up on it. Definitely a book I'd reread, and it'll probably be a book I select later in the year for this club.
Who else would like it? You'd have to be a person who enjoys grappling with a very different culture (it's definitely not in the camp of books about the near future with minor tweaks from today), who likes being challenged by political and social thought, and wants big ideas taken to a logical extreme in a book.
It's not, I think, a good first intro to SF as the leap might be too great for people, and the (apparent) glorification of a militaristic all-controlling state in the early stages of the book might put some off. However, unlike Heinlein's Starship Troopers (where in many ways the society is similar to the one here) the cracks and flaws in the culture are systematically brought to light as the book proceeds. So you'd want to be someone who had read and enjoyed some far-future SF and likes grappling with ideas and political systems more than spaceship battles )for a book about a military society, there are surprisingly few battles other than some hand-to-hand combat).
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