At first I wasn't sure what to think about Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, then I started to really love it, then I lost the thread as the central science fictional premise never really made sense to me, and then it came back together toward the end with some interesting thoughts on fascism, gender, indoctrination, and war. This one is nominated for a Hugo this year, and I will be voting for that soon. So, what did I think?
We start off with a teenager named Kyr (for "Valkyr") in a human space colony called Gaia, which is made from several old battle cruisers. She has been training to be a solider her whole life in a militaristic fascist society (somewhat reminiscent of ancient Sparta or even Plato's Republic). The "Children of Earth," as these people call themselves, see the entire meaning of their lives to be seeking revenge for the destruction of Earth decades earlier in a war with aliens.
For the first 50 pages or so, I felt like it was ... okay, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. Then Kyr is assigned to Nursery (where she will bear children for the state, which she is assured it a great honor). So, she has a crisis of faith and escapes. She leaves in search of her lost brother and things get a lot more interesting, although I still didn't see the comparison with Ursula Le Guin touted in a blurb on the back cover.
Of course, the problem is that nobody actually compares with Le Guin, but I started to see it when Kyr and friends get to know one of the "evil" aliens who has access to some kind of reality-shaping device (similar to the "shadow engines" the humans use as a sort of holodeck, but A LOT more powerful). Technically it creates pocket dimensions or other universes... or something?
I never quite understood it, but maybe it's something like a slightly more technical version of Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven? Again, there will only ever be one Le Guin, so I don't fault Tesh for not being Le Guin, but one difference is that I didn't understand how this worked in The Lathe of Heaven and it was brilliant, whereas for whatever reason I didn't quite buy it here.
I can't say why, but maybe it has to do with my intuitions about personal identity (as Saul Kripke explored in Naming and Necessity, which was recently featured on The Boys, and as Buddhists have been thinking about much longer). How much could you change about yourself in another universe and still be you? Would you be you with different parents? A different job? Different friends?
I'm enough of a Buddhist to think that maybe none of those really would be you, but then again, maybe there really isn't a "you" at all! In any case, for some reason the alternate versions of the characters didn't work as well for me, and I had trouble seeing how Kyr sort of remembers her other iterations while nobody else does?
But then again, this is exactly the same issue in The Lathe of Heaven. Maybe it's a genre issue: The Lathe of Heaven is more of a parable of the kind Le Guin wrote so well, while Some Desperate Glory is a detailed space opera novel? I'm not sure. Or maybe it was explained somewhere, and I glossed over it?
Anyway, the plot gets much weirder from there. I feel like I maybe skimmed some things I shouldn't have? I don't know. But after a lot of Kyr's deprogramming from her fascist upbringing, this reality shaping technology is used to ... well, I won't spoil it, but it did come together for me in the end.
One other bit deserves attention, because it seems to encapsulate a theme of the novel. Each section begins with excerpts from human or alien texts. In one of these, an idea is developed: that war is inevitable as long as there are conflicts, and conflicts are inevitable as long as people have differences and disagreements. The alternative is something like John Lennon's "Imagine": we'll all join together and live as one, or whatever. And this will happen through tolerance of differences that will (I guess?) mean we won't have conflicts.
Now, I'm all for tolerance and peace, love, and understanding. But it seems to me that conflicts are inevitable in a universe where people are different and want different things. As I see it, one of the deepest points of the philosophy of nonviolence (as developed by MLK, Gandhi, etc.) is that we need to develop societal systems of working through conflicts without violence. And this is not easy. It may require a complete revolution in values, as MLK said in his book Where Do We Go From Here? It's certainly not the cartoonish lampoon of nonviolence as just passively not fighting back.
Or maybe this was the point of the novel all along? Maybe violence only happens when you have inflexible, totalizing ideologies that try to erase difference by erasing people who are different (which of course never works, because that very difference is a fundamental constituent of the dualism of fascism and similar ideologies--us versus them, "real" children of Earth/Americans/Germans/Indians, etc. versus traitors/enemies of the people/"those" people, etc.
I'm honestly not quite sure this novel goes quite this deep, or maybe I missed it. Or maybe the point is even deeper: you need to fundamentally change reality to make a better society for everyone! We can do that through social and political organizing, voting, getting involved, revolution, and so on. If only we were lucky enough to have reality-shaping shadow engines in real life!
See also my Goodreads review.
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