#BlogTour ‘Some Desperate Glory’ by Emily Tesh

About the book…

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.

Huge thanks as always to Tracy at Compulsive Readers for the blogtour invite and publishers Orbit for my gifted review copy of Emily Tesh’s debut, Some Desperate Glory which is out in paperback and e-book from April 2023!

Wow, what to say about this stunning debut novel?

As Emily introduces us to the space station Gaea, Kyr-Valkyr-is a woman between lifetimes, realities and bearing the expectation of generations that came before her.

She is one of Earth’s Children, a survivor of the destruction of Earth, which at that time had 14 billion inhabitants, and she is introduced to the reader in a pencil sketch which immediately has you fleshing out her tonal range-military trained, system bucking, constantly re-evaluating the events which brought about Earth’s destruction in order to wreak vengeance.

She lives in this regimented routine with her family on this outpost, until events conspire against her to remove her from her path and try to use her to bear children, against her will, and with sons being the aim of this enforced pregnancy, keeping humanity alive by any means possible.

In opposition, her brother, not the same level of combat skill as Kyr, is sent to war.

How Kyr fights back and becomes the hero she needs to look up to is explored through smashing the gender binary, examining what is the very nature of humanity whilst diving deep into why humanity came to the edge of extinction and was not worth saving.

There is an over lying story of identity and love, love for yourself as well as finding that other, vital beating heart of you which is brilliantly juxtaposed to the brutal way humans are described as if in an anthropological textbook rught at the beginning. Their very linear and binary thinking is both strength and weakness and if Kyr is to succeed in her mission, then she needs to find a balance and a peace within herself to counter the anger and vengeance she has been schooled on all her life.

The military aspect of this novel reminds me of the Marine Corps in Aliens, where I struggle a lot with sci fi and fantasy, its down to a lack of imagination to go where the writer is taking me and I didn’t feel during  Some Desperate Glory that there was constant use of exposition to explain unfamiliar terms, nor did it feel exclusive like I should know intrinsically what was going on.

It may be a novel set in outer space, but the roots of its concerns are entirely human in origin. Vanity, self respect, love and honesty all vie with ferocity and creating a sense of equilibrium where you are not defined by a particular set of genitals, a mission to restore the human race, whilst acknowledging all the failings which brought them initially to ruin. Some Desperate Glory is the hunt for peace, reconciliation and defence of something worth fighting for.

About the author…

Emily Tesh is a winner of the Astounding Award and of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

She is the author of the Greenhollow Duology, which begins with Silver in the Wood and concludes with Drowned Country.

Links-http://emilytesh.net/

Twitter @emilytesh_uk Tr4cyF3nt0n @orbitbooks