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sophia_sol) wrote2023-06-11 08:47 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2023-06-11 08:47 pm
Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh
A future sci-fi story about what it means to have grown up in a radical militaristic doomsday cult in space - it does an amazing job of writing something incredibly readable from the pov of a horrible person. Kyr was raised to believe in the cult's values wholeheartedly so she is awful but she cares so MUCH about the things she believes in, and is so sure she's doing the right things, that the reader is drawn in anyway.
I loved seeing Kyr's slow development and change as she's exposed to other worldviews, and exposed to an increased ability to access her own emotions about the things she experienced in her cult, which she had walled herself off from because she couldn't let herself think about things that would cause so much cognitive dissonance for her. She grows and changes and learns new things, and stays essentially herself at the same time - but a version of herself where the things about her that make her such a dangerous and scary and unlikeable soldier now make her someone who's worth admiring. Kyr has various skills and strengths and weaknesses, and they stay the same whether she's using them on behalf of the cult or working against its power.
Kyr's growth reminded me some of Alexios from Frontier Wolf, about learning over the course of the book how to make decisions as a leader but but this time doing it right. And Kyr's disconnection from her own emotion reminded me of Shen Qingqiu from The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - the complete inability to notice her own romantic interest in another person, despite that interest being embarrassingly obvious to everyone around her who knows her.
I adored the fraught sometimes-friendship between Cleo and Kyr, and the complicated sibling dynamics between Mags and Kyr, and whatever the fuck was going on with Avi, and with Yiso. And I loved that multiple characters were textually queer, and it was important, and it was important to them, and also it wasn't like....more important than other things or other relationships.
It's a book about choices being important, and about the ability to make interpersonal connections to other people and to care about them, even if they're very different from you, being important. And how sometimes understanding and trust can be more important than liking or love! And that it's never too late to decide to act!
There was one thing I wasn't entirely sure about in the book though. It does a thing where due to stuff we don't need to explore at this juncture, we go through multiple versions of the universe where certain key events happen differently, with one of the big ones being the time when the aliens destroyed Earth and killed the vast majority of humans. And I'm not sure how I feel about how the least-bad option was apparently to return to a version of reality where most of humanity had been massacred.
Like, I do think it's important where we saw that alternate universe where humans winning led to the subjugation of all the alien species. But then following that up with the Wisdom deciding that that was actually a worse future.....idk. Like, I get it watsonianly, but doylistically it reads a little too much like the narrative is saying that humans are simply not to be trusted to have any actual power in the universe. Which seems awfully pessimistic for a book that's otherwise about how if you give people the opportunity to understand the universe from different viewpoints they can learn to make different and better choices.
I loved seeing Kyr's slow development and change as she's exposed to other worldviews, and exposed to an increased ability to access her own emotions about the things she experienced in her cult, which she had walled herself off from because she couldn't let herself think about things that would cause so much cognitive dissonance for her. She grows and changes and learns new things, and stays essentially herself at the same time - but a version of herself where the things about her that make her such a dangerous and scary and unlikeable soldier now make her someone who's worth admiring. Kyr has various skills and strengths and weaknesses, and they stay the same whether she's using them on behalf of the cult or working against its power.
Kyr's growth reminded me some of Alexios from Frontier Wolf, about learning over the course of the book how to make decisions as a leader but but this time doing it right. And Kyr's disconnection from her own emotion reminded me of Shen Qingqiu from The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - the complete inability to notice her own romantic interest in another person, despite that interest being embarrassingly obvious to everyone around her who knows her.
I adored the fraught sometimes-friendship between Cleo and Kyr, and the complicated sibling dynamics between Mags and Kyr, and whatever the fuck was going on with Avi, and with Yiso. And I loved that multiple characters were textually queer, and it was important, and it was important to them, and also it wasn't like....more important than other things or other relationships.
It's a book about choices being important, and about the ability to make interpersonal connections to other people and to care about them, even if they're very different from you, being important. And how sometimes understanding and trust can be more important than liking or love! And that it's never too late to decide to act!
There was one thing I wasn't entirely sure about in the book though. It does a thing where due to stuff we don't need to explore at this juncture, we go through multiple versions of the universe where certain key events happen differently, with one of the big ones being the time when the aliens destroyed Earth and killed the vast majority of humans. And I'm not sure how I feel about how the least-bad option was apparently to return to a version of reality where most of humanity had been massacred.
Like, I do think it's important where we saw that alternate universe where humans winning led to the subjugation of all the alien species. But then following that up with the Wisdom deciding that that was actually a worse future.....idk. Like, I get it watsonianly, but doylistically it reads a little too much like the narrative is saying that humans are simply not to be trusted to have any actual power in the universe. Which seems awfully pessimistic for a book that's otherwise about how if you give people the opportunity to understand the universe from different viewpoints they can learn to make different and better choices.
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Kyr has various skills and strengths and weaknesses, and they stay the same whether she's using them on behalf of the cult or working against its power.
Yes! I really loved how COHERENT she was as a character, in every AU and through all her growth. She's such a well done unreliable narrator in that regard!
. And I'm not sure how I feel about how the least-bad option was apparently to return to a version of reality where most of humanity had been massacred.
This bugged me, too. The doylistic problem you had with it, specifically -- to me also it felt like the narrative was agreeing that the destruction of Earth was the way to get to the happy ending, which was an unexpected take, and one that felt jarring to me. And the first time around, it was Leru who made the decision, and while I actually liked Leru a lot as a character, they are clearly not forgiven for it. But the second time it was the Wisdom itself that makes the decision, and survives (in some form) it turns out, but neither Kyr nor the narrative ever stop to hold it accountable for the implications or even question/talk about it at all. Which was just weird!
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But the second time it was the Wisdom itself that makes the decision, and survives (in some form) it turns out, but neither Kyr nor the narrative ever stop to hold it accountable for the implications or even question/talk about it at all. Which was just weird!
Exactlyyyyyyyyy! Ugh it's just so jarring to me honestly.
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It's one of those books that really leans into how complicated people are--I see this especially with Avi, who I feel like would have been a very different (lesser) character in most other books.
And I'm not sure how I feel about how the least-bad option was apparently to return to a version of reality where most of humanity had been massacred....Like, I get it watsonianly, but doylistically it reads a little too much like the narrative is saying that humans are simply not to be trusted to have any actual power in the universe. Which seems awfully pessimistic for a book that's otherwise about how if you give people the opportunity to understand the universe from different viewpoints they can learn to make different and better choices.
Yeah. I chose to read it as "we're going back to the original version of the universe," but of course that's not how the multiverse actually works...
But yes, I was really, really glad that the Wisdom essentially shut itself down, but still, we're living in a universe where the world was destroyed....
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