#book: some desperate glory

[haveyoureadthispoll]

While we live, the enemy shall fear us. All her life Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the all-powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the Majoda their victory over humanity. They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. But when Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, she escapes from everything she’s ever known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined. A thrillingly told queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory is award-winning author Emily Tesh’s highly anticipated debut novel.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[melanielocke]

Book recommendations: queer adult SFF

It's been a while since I did one of these posts but I'm thinking of doing more regularly. I have read a lot more new books that I hope some of you will pick up and I've made another selection. I'm reading more and more adult SFF lately because lots of YA is getting a little too young for me. But I also find that transitioning to reading more adult can be difficult, and it's not always easy to find what you're looking for. I found YA a far easier market to navigate, so I figured I'd make a post featuring some of my favorite adult SFF books.

The Unbroken & the Faithless I read recently.

This is a trilogy, with book 3 coming out most likely in 2025? Not sure actually. The series focuses on Touraine and Luca. Touraine is a conscript in the Balladaire army, stolen from her homeland and trained to fight from a young age. She is originally from Qazal, a country colonized by Balladaire, but doesn't speak their language or understand their customs. In the first book, she returns home for the first time since she was taken, to stop a Qazali rebellion.

Luca is the princess of Balladaire. Her parents both died when she was young, and her uncle is ruling as regent, refusing to allow her to be crowned Queen until she proves herself. She too is sent to deal with the Qazali rebellion. What makes Luca interesting is that she often means well and is definitely more benevolent towards the Qazali, but she's also very power hungry and wants her throne, and no matter how much she does to help the Qazali she is still the princess of the empire that colonized them, and the author continues to hold her accountable for her role in the empire and some of the choices she makes.

Luca is also disabled, she injured her leg when she was young and uses a cane.

There is a sapphic romance between Luca and Touraine. It is not really the focus on the series but at the same time it is what shapes much of the negotiating between them since Luca has a very obvious soft spot for Touraine and Touraine has to use that to improve things for Qazal.

The world is inspired by North Africa and French colonialism (in Balladaire they speak French so I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be France), and the author themself is Black and North African. The series as a whole is very political.

Next is Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans

This is the first in a duology (I think?) with book 2 coming out this November.

This is set in a world where there are four different planes, and Siyon is a poor man who can delve into the different planes to get ingredients for wealthier alchemists. He wants to be an alchemist himself but can't afford the education. There's also the problem of magic being technically illegal, which means rich people can do alchemy but poor people can't.

Then one day Siyon accidently unleashes wild magic and is thrust into the world of alchemists where he wants to belong but doesn't. And there's also the matter of the four planes being instable and at risk of collapsing, and Siyon might be the only one capable of stopping it.

Siyon is bi/pan and his main love interest is a man, though this is not the main focus of the series.

Then Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

I think I had this one last time too, but not enough people are reading it so I'm going to discuss it again.

Check out the summary, but honestly not sure if that does it justice. Some Desperate Glory is the story of a girl who grew up in a fascist cult and was raised to believe in everything this cult stands for.

The earth was destroyed before she was born, and the Majo, aliens, were responsible. Kyr has been training her entire life for revenge. She wants nothing more than to be the perfect soldier for earth. As a result, she is a terrible person and everyone hates her.

Kyr first starts questioning Gaea station when she is assigned nursery to have babies even though she is the best fighter in her mess. When her brother disappears, she teams up with his friend Avi, a queer genius who works with the station's systems and was always aware of how fucked up Gaea station is. They discover Magnus has been sent on a suicide mission and go after him, and Kyr is confronted with the outside world, including a Majo she grows close to, and has to unlearn everything Gaea station taught her.

This book has a difficult to stomach mc at first, though it is very obvious what she believes is not what you as the reader are supposed to think. But there is some wonderful character development going on in here. It's hard for her to change, and she's thrown into lots of difficult situations before she gets there, but in the end you can see she's nothing like the person she was before.

There's an amazing cast of side characters, though not a very big cast. There's her twin brother Magnus who never wanted to be a soldier and is actually very depressed, which Kyr never noticed. Yiso, the cute non binary alien Kyr develops a weak spot for even before she comes to realize Majo are people. And my personal favorite, Avi, who is an unhinged little guy who is way too smart for his own good. He's a great example of how a cult can affect different people in different ways. He doesn't believe in Gaea station like Kyr does and is aware of how fucked up he is, he experienced that first hand as the only visible queer person on the station. But he did internalize their messages of revenge and violence which plays out in interesting ways.

This edition is the Illumicrate edition of the book from April's box, which has the UK cover.

Witch King by Martha Wells is next

This is a confusing book for people who do not have a lot of experience reading adult fantasy. It has a lot of world building that is explained gradually, the book doesn't really hold your hand, so be prepared for that.

Kai is a body hopping demon. He has been betrayed, killed and entombed under water. When he is freed by a lesser mage hoping to hone his power, he kills them and frees himself and his friend, the witch Ziede.

Together, they have to uncover what happened to them, who betrayed them and what is going on with the Rising World coalition. He's not going to like the answers.

Alternating is a past timeline in which Kai and his band of allies rebel against the tyrannical rule of the Hierophants, which happened decades before the present timeline.

The strenght of this book is really in the characters and how they grow and the bonds they have with each other. I loved the relationship between Kai and Bashasa, who is the rebel leader in the past timeline in particular. It's not quite clear what the nature of their relationship was, though it is implied to be romantic and I do think Kai is supposed to be queer. He is a body hopping demon after all, and spends his early life in the body of a girl. There's also a sapphic side pairing between Zieden and her wife Tahren, who they spent much of the present timeline looking for.

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach

This is a science fantasy set in a world inspired by New Zealand and Maori (I think? The author is Maori and a trans woman herself)

The main character is a police officer from a poor background who believes she's making the world better for people like her. She's already been demoted for being queer but believes she can make the police force better from the inside.

Then she's murdered by fellow officers and thrown into the harbor. Unfortunately for them, she comes back from the dead with new magic powers.

She teams up with a pirate crew with similar powers and has to stop a plague from being unleashed on her city.

This book focuses on how police functions in many modern societies to protect the wealthy and harm and restrict poorer, non white communities. The main character doesn't believe this at first but it's obvious to the reader that they're not helping anyone doing their job. Next book is coming out next year.

Last is the Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

Two books are out and book 3 is coming sometime in 2024.

This series is set in a world inspired by India. Priya is a maidservant with a secret. She is one of the few surviving temple children and still has some powers from being once born.

Malini is the princess of Parijatdvipa, the empire that conquered Priya's land. Her religious zealot brother has taken the throne and imprisons Malini because she refuses to be burned alive.

Priya is one of the maidservants sent to take care of Malini in her prison, which is the old temple where Priya grew up. Together, they can change the fate of an empire, but they can never quite trust each other.

This is a sapphic fantasy with magic but also lots of politics and I think if you like this series you'd also like the Unbroken and vice versa. I've talked about this one before but it should definitely be included on a list for adult fantasy.

I hope you can find something you like on here. All these books are not super well known and deserve a bigger audience

@alastaircarstairsdefenselawyer @life-through-the-eyes-of @astriefer @justanormaldemon @ipromiseiwillwrite @a-dream-dirty-and-bruised @amchara @all-for-the-fanfiction @imsoftforthomastair @ddepressedbookworm @queenlilith43 @wagner-fell @cant-think-of-anything @laylax13s @tessherongraystairs @boredfangirl16 @artist-in-soul @aliandtommy @ikissedsmithparker

[themelodyofspring]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge

May 11 - Nature 💐

[liesmyth]

my problem with some desperate glory was that I loved all the stuff it was doing quietly, but once it started talking about stuff openly I started rolling my eyes. maybe this is a me problem, but for a book whose politics I agree with, I was getting very tired of "look at this queer-normative universe!" "look the Black girl is underestimated by the white men in charge" stuff. but the creeping horror of the forced pregnancy stuff? the genocide bits? all excellent. so I'm feeling really conflicted on it tbh

you 🤝 me not wanting to be spoon-fed Themes

I think there's a broader discussion to be had here, which is: when you want to write Politically Aware Genre Fiction, sometimes you have to really hit the reader in the face with it, because many readers are primed to ignore Issues if they are subtextual. see also that NK Jemisin thread about "blatant" vs "subtle" approach to discrimination in scifi. I think she makes very valid points! I also think that some of her books personally are not to my taste, because I got the message the first twelve times and then I got bored.

SDC does some of that, repeating so, so many times that there are no high-ranking female officers on Gaea and the population is 95% White. (Exordia, which I'm reading rn, also does that re: US military war crimes, and I'm getting tired of it already 200 pages in). I didn't find the Themes of it all to be THAT grating in SDG but, to me, the main issue is that, by the very nature of the worldbuilding... there just aren't many complex female characters, barring the POV character who's very much A Teenager in a way that makes the story feel very coming of age, and idk. I was not expecting a novel about a bunch of young adults coming together to save their society (in a way that was ultimately maybe a bit anticlimactic) although I really enjoyed all that came beforehand. I think I would have liked the book more if it had ended at like 80% and there had been a time skip sequel, or a different ending sequence.

Also: weirdly enough for as much as I'm bitching and moaning that I wanted more morally grey women, my favourite character was probably Avi. I think that if his Corporal Lin had more space I would have been ALL OVER her.

[augustinajosefina]

A request

Please suggest books to me! Preferably in the glove kink/lesbian space atrocities, urban fantasy or dark academia genres but I'll happily try any SF/fantasy at least once.

So far I've read and loved:

Before 2023

The Imperial Radch (Ancillary Justice/Sword/Mercy) - Ann Leckie

Jean le Flambeur (The Quantum Thief/The Fractal Prince/The Causal Angel) - Hannu Rajaniemi

The Windup Girl/The Water Knife - Paolo Bagicalupi

Memory of Water/The City of Woven Streets - Emmi Itäranta

2023

The Locked Tomb (Gideon/Harrow/Nona the Ninth) - Tamsyn Muir

The Masquerade (Traitor/Monster/Tyrant Baru Cormorant) - Seth Dickinson

Teixcalaan series (A Memory Called Empire/A Desolation Called Peace) - Arkady Martine

Machineries of Empire (Ninefox Gambit/Raven Stratagem/Revenant Gun/Hexarchate Stories) - Yoon Ha Lee

The Murderbot Diaries (All Systems Red to System Collapse) - Martha Wells

The Broken Earth (The Fifth Season/The Obelisk Gate/The Stone Sky) - N. K. Jemisin

Klara And The Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

Xuya universe (The Citadel of Weeping Pearls/The Tea Master and the Detective/Seven of Infinities plus short stories) - Aliette de Bodard

This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The Goblin Emperor/The Witness for the Dead/Grief of Stones - Katherine Addison

Some Desperate Glory - Emily Tesh

2024

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab

The Craft Sequence (Three Parts Dead/Two Serpents Rise/Full Fathom Five/Last First Snow/Four Roads Cross/Ruin of Angels) - Max Gladstone

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution - R. F. Kuang

Dead Country - Max Gladstone

Hands of the Emperor - Victoria Goddard

Read and liked:

The Moonday Letters - Emmi Itäranta

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Great Cities (The City We Became/The World We Make) - N. K. Jemisin

Autonomous - Annalee Newitz

Dead Djinn universe (A Master of Djinn/The Haunting of Tram Car 015/A Dead Djinn in Cairo/The Angel of Khan el-Khalili) - P. Djèlí Clark

Even Though I Knew the End - C. L. Polk

Station Eternity - Mur Lafferty

The Mythic Dream - Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe

Shades of Magic (A Darker Shade of Magic/A Gathering of Shadows/A Conjuring of Light/Fragile Threads of Power) - V. E. Schwab

The Luminous Dead - Caitlin Starling

Last Exit - Max Gladstone

The Stars Are Legion - Kameron Hurley

Ninth House/Hell Bent - Leigh Bardugo

Machine - Elizabeth Bear

Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield

She Is A Haunting - Trang Thanh Tran

Sisters of the Revolution - Jeff & Ann Vandermeer

Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel

Nettle & Bone - T. Kingfisher

Monstrilio - Gerardo Samano Córdova

Was uncertain about:

Light From Uncommon Stars - Ryka Aoki

The Kaiju Preservation Society - John Scalzi

Paladin's Grace - T. Kingfisher

The House in the Cerulean Sea - TJ Klune

In the Vanishers Palace - Aliette de Bodard

Uprooted - Naomi Novik

What Moves The Dead - T. Kingfisher

All The Birds In The Sky - Charlie Jane Anders

And read and disliked:

To Be Taught, if Fortunate - Becky Chambers

A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers

The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon

The Calculating Stars - Mary Robinette Kowal

The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson

How High We Go in the Dark - Sequoia Nagamatsu

Shadow and Bone - Leigh Bardugo

The Passage - Justin Cronin

In Ascension - Martin MacInnes

(My pride insists I add that I have, in fact, read other books as well. Just to be clear.)

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Characters, book, and author names under the cut

Magnus Marston/Avicenna - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Will Kempen/James St Clair - Dark Rise series by C.S. Pacat

Norma/Badyah - Deadendia by Hamish Steele

Lula Talisola/Zeen Mrala - Midnight Horizon by Daniel José Older

[suprsaturatd]

Gaea Station did not look outward. It had never bothered with windows.

Holy shit please read Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh that was probably the best book I’ve read in ages?!?!?!?!!!!! Anyways here’s the space hulk station made out of four crashed battle cruisers that would not get out of my head until i drew it.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 49 – Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Introduction

I forget who initially recommended me this book, but I owe them an incredible debt. Really the only disappointing thing is that I hadn’t heard of it even sooner, as this really is just perfectly tailored to appeal to me specifically. First science fiction/fantasy novel I can remember reading in a long time that I actively wished was longer. As a testament to how much I liked this book – this review is long enough to need subheadings.

So! Some Desperate Glory is a space opera, following Kyr (Valkyr, technically), a 17-year-old cadet and genetically enhanced ‘warbreed’ golden girl of Gaea Station – that being the quasi-fascist statelet of militant dead-enders who fled to a desolate planetoid in a dead system to continue the war after aliens destroyed the earth/most of humanity. After she gets assigned to Nursery (read: breeding the next generation of soldiers) instead of a combat wing and has a crisis of faith, she talks herself into running away to help her brother on the suicide mission terrorist attack he was deployed on. With the help of one of her brother’s friends and a captured alien, she manages it, discovers that her brother had absolutely no intention of actually following orders once he’d made it out, and take it upon herself to do her own, better, terrorism. From there the plot gets weird, and I’m going to spoil it shamelessly talking about it, but if you value surprises when reading at all just stop this review and go read it.

The Heroine

Kyr is, and I say this lovingly, the most insufferable bitch of a 17-year-old military brat I’ve ever spent time in the head of (at least at first). Even compared to the other indoctrinated child soldiers she’s the cop nobody likes. She then spends the first third to half of the book unlearning this indoctrination, by which I mean very arduously and painfully reaching a point of ‘the fascist cult was a corruption and black mark on the good name of the death cult vengeful crusade, I’ll do it better’ and ‘it’s probably okay to not, like, personally hate aliens who were too young to have been alive when the earth was destroyed. Torturing them for no reason is wrong, like abusing animals was, back when there were animals’. She spends the entire book expecting on a bone-deep level to get herself killed for the cause, and at the end of the book is only like 10% of the way better (one of the last beats in the entire story is, standing with one of her only friends and sure they’re both about to run out of life support, offering to snap their neck for them because ‘asphyxiation’s a nasty way to go’). Whenever she is confronted with the idea that some people aren’t constantly aware of the possibility of physical violence or get to live their lives as something other than a bullet in the gun seeking vengeance for a dead planet she wants to scream and smash things at the unfairness of it all. I adore her.

Honestly my only real complaint is how quickly she starts mellowing out in the second and third acts of the story. There’s extenuating circumstances (whole extra life of memories, time loop bullshit, forcibly confronted with what she said she wanted and what it looks like, etc), but past the one real big hump it did rather feel like her character development suddenly became a bit smooth and easy/. This is one of the things I’m talking about when I say I wish the book was longer – everything after the first big climax and the time travel/universe editing felt kind of rushed and abbreviated.

As far as being a #problematic fave goes, Kyr was also very carefully kept from being, like, directly personally culpable for anything really unforgivable. Which I do understand why from a wanting people to sympathize with the racist homophobic fascist child soldier, but like – you’ve already introduced time travel and retroactivity. C’mon, don’t get cold feet now. Let her and Avi really share the ‘killed trillions in a universe that retroactively never happened’ credit.

Also, and entirely tangentially – you know how in a lot of action shows, the hero has incredibly emotionally tense rivalries and/or camaraderie with other guys, and then also an extremely conventionally feminine girlfriend off to the side somewhere who does like two things in the entire story and mostly seems to exist to prove he’s straight? Kyr has that, except she is textually gay (if incredibly repressed about it and like 90% of the way to asexual in terms of libido). Sorry Lis, but you are literally barely a character. Cleo’s right there, and already has a personality that’s more than two bullet points and is actually involved in the plot in ways beyond ‘love interest’.

Gaea Station

The shitty fascist asteroid habitat that Kyr grew up on is (if barely) the primary setting of the story, and as far as portrayals of incredibly unbalanced and fundamentally broken society just full of cultlike and ultranationalist neuross. I kind of love it as a dystopian setting, though I feel like the author kind of over-egged the pudding on it by the end of the book.

Society is organized into what feels like an intentional parody of a lot of YA dystopia setups, where you live in a tightly integrated mess all through adolescence (each with their own heraldic animal to idenity with!) but then at 17 your exams determine the branch of society you will be assigned to for the rest of your life to do your duty for humanity. Of course, unlike most YA dystopias, the System isn’t the result of some leviathan-state ruling the fates of millions or a tradition that’s going back generations upon generations – it’s a ramshackle mess that can barely consistently feed its warrior elites enough protein slop to take advantage of their genetically engineered hormone levels for muscle growth. It’s all so clearly and intentionally artificial and fake that it loops around to feeling extremely realistic.

Also do love how the elder generation all have names like Joel or Ursa or Elena, while the younger generation are all Valkyr and Magnus and Avicenna and Zenobia. The only really surprising thing is that they don’t specifically call out how children are raised in common and without individual families as following Plato’s Republic – it’s exactly the sort of attempt to create a grand unifying mythology for all of Earth’s true and vengeful children.

I really do wish Tesh had trusted the reader a bit more about it, though. Like, we can tell that almost all the names of the younger generation are either historical figures form the Mediterranean/Greco-Roman world or Norse mythology (with a few exceptions like Avicenna who fit the general aesthetic if not those exact conditions), which puts a bit of a lie to the whole ‘pan-human’ bit. It’s a clever bit of characterization through worldbuilding! You don’t need to call it out twice in dialogue between characters and then again in an in-universe scholarly essay excerpt at the start of a chapter. I can’t complain too badly though, she’s really not even close to being the worst for that I’ve read recently.

One thing I did like especially because I don’t think it was ever called out and brought front and centre is just the sort of, like, perfect irony of both Kyr and her brother Magnus – ‘warbreed’ engineered supersoldiers with physical capabilities beyond any baseline human, blonde aryan ubermensch, the golden children and eugenic future of Gaea Station/true humanity – both being queer and totally unsuited to their assigned gender roles. If it was, like, specifically brought up in a big monologue as disproof of the Gaean ideology or something it’d feel much too on the nose, but as just a set of facts underlying the characterization of the protagonists I liked it quite a lot.

Trio Dynamics

They don’t actually have all that much pagecount spent together, now that I think about it, but as far as I’m concerned the absolute heart of the story is the dynamic between Kyr, Avi (Avicenna, genius-level hacker and cynical rat bastard discontented Gaea Station restaurant) and Yiso (young and rebellious Prince of the Wisdom, taken captive by Gaea when they’re personal ship came too close and then liberated/kidnapped by the other two in their escape attempt). It’s peak trauma-bonding in that the first time it involves a) Avi torturing Yiso to force the alien supercomputer to let him access it and b) Kyr shooting Avi in the head after he uses access to the supercomputer to wipe out 90% of galactic civilization as payback for the whole ‘destroyed Earth with an antimatter missile’ thing (she got a case of morals when confronted with what ‘winning’ would mean. Also her brother shooting himself.)

By all rights they should absolutely hate each other and after two temporal recursions and oceans of retroactively unspilled blood on all their hands they’re the only people who even slightly understand each other. At one point Kyr tells Yiso ‘just so you know, I don’t really care about you as a person,’ and then immideately thinks ‘that was a lie. Why did I say that?’ Avi and Kyr both deprogram themselves from the cult that raised them but only the ‘loyalty to the cult’ bits and not the ‘alien race war vengance death cult’ bits. Yiso meets Kyr in an atemporal training simulation and gets retroactive Stockholm syndrone even though the first time they actually meet she breaks their ribs for repressed teenager reasons. They all drive me absolutely insane and I absolutely adore them. Even if Avi’s redemption felt waaaaay too rushed and unjustified in the final recursion, willing to forgive it here.

Time Loops

The big twist of the story is that, having fucked up and enabled Avi taking vengeance for Earth by doing the same thing to every other alien species, Kyr jumps into the alien supercomputer time manipulation buisness wholesale and goes back to prevent the destruction of Earth. Which then fast forwards to her being a newly minted officer in the Terran Expeditionary Fleet that is the imperial power dominating the known galaxy in increasingly high-collateral damage ways as time goes on. Yiso, in this timeline the beating heart and soul of the main alien resistance group, seeks her out and restores her memories and they go back to try and hijack the alien supercomputer before the government office whose hijacked its crippled remnants (as helmed by the alternate-timeline version of Gaea Station’s great leader, now a fleet admiral of the ‘Providence’ division) manage to literally destroy the universe.

It is mostly down to all the fanfic I’ve read, but I really, really adore timeline divergences that ropagate out and leave all the major characters different but similar people in alien yet appropriate situations. I also adore time travel stories about someone turning the timeline into swiss cheese trying to brute force their way to the one and only golden ending. So I adore this whole conceit. Really my only complaint is that there were only two (one and a half, really) recursions. Not that I’m demanding a full groundhog day here. But, like, it’d have been nice. And Kyr/Avi/Yiso continuously bumping into each other in different configurations and usually ending up at gunpoint would have been ann absolutely amazing bit.

Space Orcs

I can’t be sure Tesh actually had any exposure to the whole online meme of ‘humans as space orcs’, but I do and it’s really impossible to read the book as anything but an examination of the idea. Compared to every alien species ever encountered, humans are tall, heavy, muscular, impulsive, and violent. In a one-on-one confrontation they’ll snap any other species’ neck. The very first pages of the book are an excerpt from an in-universe text writing for an aliens about how actually really humans are very intelligent, and then talking about how threat displays and ‘human culture’. In the original timeline they even fit into the usual social niche of orcs in a lot of fantasy these days – the scattered and diminished remnants of a brutal empire that was defeated and mostly-exterminated in their attempts to conquer the universe.

The book’s handling of this doesn’t really have a point, as far as I can tell – the worldbuilding’s sufficiently divorced from anything real that trying to call it a commentary on racism or genocide or conquering empires is a stretch. (It is after all a fundamental point of the book that the obliteration of earth and extermination of the vast majority of humanity really was the only way the Wisdom could prevent the Terran Federation from conquering the known galaxy. Which is I’m extremely sure not something the author intends to be a historical analogy.) I found it a fun bit of worldbuilding and interesting subversion of normal space opera tropes regarding humanity’s relative abilities, anyway.

Theodicy

Is an incredibly pretentious way to title this section, but also in a sense kind of the core of the book’s plot? In an interesting way, and I think it’s really the book’s greatest weakness that it doesn’t explore or grapple with it enough.

Which is to say – the Wisdom is at the heart of galactic civilization. It’s an alien AI with vague but vast (though limited) reality-warping and precognitive powers. It does not rule the civilizations that accept it, but guides them as a benevolent god towards best, happiest outcomes with whatever support they ask for or need. To determine what ‘best’ means, it creates its Princes, vat-grown heirs to the dead species that created it, with a lifespan of millenia spent going through simulations and interacting with the world to provide the data and decision-making it requires to make that sort of strategic decision.

The Terran Federation’s attempt to reverse-engineer or hijack the Wisdom put it in a situation where the only solution its princes could find was to destroy the better part of humanity and even more of their industry and culture. Through the plot of the first acts of the book, Kyr and her genius-level-hacker friend hijack a node of it and Kyr convinces/forces it to accept her decision-making instead of its prince (who they just killed). This results in an explicitly colonialist human empire ruling over aliens as oppressed subjects, and using the half-wrecked and poorly understood Wisdom to eliminate threats before they occur (shunting the reality backlash off to alien worlds they don’t care about). The next acts of the book mostly resolve around fixing or reverting this, and end with Kyr diving back into a node and having another conversation with it.

A conversation which is basically it giving up. It reverts things back to the human-genocide timeline, then shuts down its infrastructure and goes dark, leaving the entire mostly pacifistic and loosely governed galactic civilization it had protected suddenly on its own. Humanity were such assholes we found a loving god and then convinced it to kill itself.

Which, like, could 100% totally work. As far as high concept short story prompts go its incredible. But as far as actually driving the action goes the Wisdom is the one who makes the most important deciisons in the entire book, and determine the entire shape of the plot. For it to land, it really really needed more than two and a half short conversations on screen, at least to me.

TL:DR

Good book, lesbian doing space atrocities, should have been longer.

[aroaceineveryplace]

“Haven’t you ever liked someone, or cared about them?” 

“I care about you,” Kyr said. 

“Not like that!” Mags rounded on her. “Haven’t you ever wanted someone?” 

Kyr got to her feet, not liking the look on his face, but before she could say anything he barreled on. This was the most she had heard him talk at once in years, the most expression she’d seen him show since the awful months after Ursa had left. 

“Forget the queer thing,” he snarled, “just—don’t you ever want to touch anyone? Don’t you ever want to be with someone, to love someone—” 

He broke off, gasping again. Kyr’s body moved before she realized that she knew what to do. Kyr’s body was always the best of her. She went to Mags and put her arms around him, and he shuddered like it hurt and then collapsed into the hug. Kyr could feel dampness where he had his hot face against her temple. 

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.” He was shaking. Kyr found that her hand was rubbing soothing circles on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s okay.” 

Do you really think it doesn’t count, that I care about you? she wanted to say. Do you think it doesn’t count, when I refused my assignment, when I left home, when Cleo called me a traitor—I got stabbed, did you know—when I came to this stupid collaborator planet and lived in a shack with a majo for two weeks and then had to see Ursa again—all of that—just because it’s nothing to do with sex stuff, do you really think it doesn’t count?

— Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory

[artificial-condition]

The book “Some Desperate Glory” by Emily Tesh is so underrated on here. I can’t help but feel like tumblr would love it, your main character is so so so bad, just awful dirtbag person who is so oblivious to how bad she is and that everyone hates her, who then gets pulled throughout so many timelines to where she actually realizes “maybe I suck” and continues to suck but is actively trying not to suck. She’s just awful and it’s so good

[hvacinth]

books i've read in 2024: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Kyr pressed her lips tightly together. The cold voice that was her own said: You are very angry. She had never felt anger quite like this before. It turned the edges of her vision glitteringly sharp.

[nonas-third-tantrum]

I’m not even halfway through but Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is rewiring my brain in the way a book hasn’t been able to do since I first read tlt

if you’ve read it please talk to me about it and if you haven’t read it GO READ IT

[no-where-new-hero]

✣ Blake Wrapped: 5 Star Reads 📖

The first half of this post can be found HERE, and these were my 5-star reads for the second half of the year (in rough order). Tagging @batrachised, who was interested in recommendations!

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh I posted a lot about this when I read it because in my opinion it’s one of the best SFF novels I’ve come across in a while. It reminded me of DWJ’s Hexwood, which is already high praise, but it’s a fabulous character study with incredible dynamics. It’s another new book with truly horrible marketing, imo—the whole “queer sci-fi” angle gives the impression of a Gideon the Ninth rip-off, but there’s much more political and social commentary with fabulous world-building. Highly, highly recommend this one.

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan I loved the first book in this duology, but this one was exquisite to new heights. Even though it was never that overt, it did a lot of great meta-commentary work on the chosen one trope vs the doomed by the narrative trope, especially their intersection with gender expectations. The prose was simply gorgeous, occasionally philosophical, always sure-handed. I recommend the whole duology, though mostly so that you can get to this one.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson I picked this up in my library’s for sale room, and it was the best choice I made this year. I can’t believe I had been missing out on Jackson for so long. It’s a ghost story and a Gothic novel and a girl book and feels a bit like the shadow side of an LM Montgomery story. The language and characters are rich and strange and is so thoroughly a Blake Book of all time. I want to be able to write something like this someday.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang The reports of its readability are true—I went through this in three hours. I get why people complain about certain elements in this, but it also lives up to the hype, in my opinion. I might be the target audience as an aspiring author (who got throughly traumatized by the portrayal of terminally online author culture lmao) but I do think those dynamics and circumstances are its strength, more so than the social commentaries on Asian American tokenization, etc.

How Long ’Til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin I don’t often read short fiction, but I was in the mood for some good SFF shorts to learn from, so picked this up. Jemisin is a master of form—her ability to depict a world in such a brief span, to make such deep characters with such clever scenarios is unmatched. Certainly, there are some better examples than others, but the best makes me wish there were a whole novel set in that world.

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson This one is a slight cheat because it’s not Jackson’s best, but it’s also a Blake Book of all time, so how could I not give it five stars? I wish I had discovered it in college, if just to be able to be insufferable and call myself “irl Natalie Waite” everywhere. It’s such a Tumblr book too—the veiled queerness, the Plath vibes, the dark academia setting, the unhinged vibes. The prose is gorgeous and unsettling and is such a good portrayal of a character.

[themelodyofspring]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge

January 08 - Other-Worldly

[liesmyth]

OK I REALLY, REALLY LIKED SOME DESPERATE GLORY. I need to sleep on it but it's one of my favourite books I've read this year for sure. there was A Lot going on and I liked all of it (though for some reason I expected it to be darker) my one nitpick is no evil women... or morally shady women... otoh corporale Lin was hot. old woman save me.