This was my first Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist this year; I knew nothing at all about the book going in, though I must have heard of it at some point because I later realized it was on my "to check out" list at the public library (at list I have been populating for five years but never checked anything out from). I do really like when I can encounter books this way, when I can let them work upon me with no expectations or weight at all. As I say around here a lot, part of the appeal of sf is that the world itself is a mystery, and the less you know going in, the better the mystery is!
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Published: 2023 Acquired: April 2024 Read: May 2024 |
So I am going to undermine the book by telling you what it's like, but hey, if that's a problem for you, you shouldn't be reading a book review blog. Another thing I enjoy about sf is articulating subgenre; Some Desperate Glory clearly comes out of the same space/movement as Ancillary Justice, Machineries of Empire, and A Memory Called Empire. Like those works, it's in the space opera zone to some extent, and it's about what makes empire equally appealing and horrifying...* although, not quite. While those other works are about a society's outward projection of power, Some Desperate Glory is more about a society's inward projection of power—facsism. How does a society exert power over its own members, shape them into the people they need to be? How does it cause us to shape ourselves, how do we become complicit in this? Our viewpoint character is a fascist who has totally bought into the rhetoric of her own people, but we can see what she cannot, the ways in which this has rendered her shortsighted and awful. This is a little frustrating at first, because it's so obvious that she's in the wrong, but kind of fascinating, too; I think Tesh did a good job inhabiting Valkyr's headspace.
Every now and again something really significant would happen in a very understated way, and this was my biggest actual problem with the book. I would end up missing something really quite important and have to go back! I don't know if these parts were done that way on purpose, or if it's just an unfortunate writing tic, but I found it frustrating. Maybe if I was reading in a less distracted environment, but I am the parent of two children five and under as well as a professor who squeezed the book in small chunks during final week so there's no much I can do about that!
Other than that, I really enjoyed the book. I was getting "this is pretty good vibes" for most of it, but then in ch. 27 (specifically, on p. 357 in my 2023 Orbit paperback) the characters make a ridiculously audacious choice that genuinely made me laugh out loud from the sheer pleasure of it. From then on, I was in love. Like those books I listed above, Some Desperate Glory is about doing the right thing in the face of a society determined to prevent it. What makes this sequence work so well is how far Kyr and the other characters end up going to make this happen, how they learn what matters is not just saving themselves from fascism, but others as well. Lots of great payoffs in the last hundred pages, making ultimately a very satisfying novel about the difficult lengths one has to go to in order to make oneself into the person one ought to have been.
There's more to talk about, harrowing stuff about gender and queerness especially. But I'll leave that for people better equipped to do so.
* The Traitor Baru Cormorant doesn't take place in space, but otherwise it overlaps with these as well; if you like all these space novels, you'll probably like Traitor as well.
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