Some Desperate Glory (en-Latn language, 2023, Orbit Books)
438 pages
en-Latn language
Published Jan. 1, 2023 by Orbit Books.
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 novel. While we live, the enemy shall fear us. Since she was born, 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 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. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to 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 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 novel. While we live, the enemy shall fear us. Since she was born, 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 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. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to 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, Kyr escapes from everything she's known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
Incredible pace and a depth of painful experiences that beautifully if implausibly bend towards light and attempting to right wrongs when our characters break loose and are able to reflect. Despite some structural misgivings, I loved everywhere this went.
This has a whole bunch of elements that i loved, but mostly a great plot and clear character arc. At the start of the book, Kyr is an about-to-graduate cadet on a asteroid bound space station that houses the last few thousands of humanity after an alien civilization has destroyed Earth.
Things are not as they seem, which Kyr finds out by getting assigned to Nursery to bear children for humanity, despite her top scores, and her brother refusing assignment and deserting.
A word of warning that there's some intense cult-like abuse in the pages.
I read this on the recommendation of @charliejane@wandering.shop in her Washington Post column on SF. You should read her columns too.
www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/08/nick-harkaway-bina-shah-moniquill-blackgoose/
This book really stuck with me after reading it. I had to stop reading it before bed because I would stay up too late reading it, which is a trait I cherish in a book and is also hard to pull off in a book with such heavy themes -- brainwashing, abuse, reproductive coercion, war,.... And the characters were so well articulated. I really live for books where characters seem like actual humans who are capable of being really truly horrible to each other and also capable of kindness and growth.
