Since the election, I’ve been having a lot of discussions with friends about how to interact with people on the other side of the political divide.
I was going to write “political line” there, but that word choice wouldn’t be accurate to the conversation. Things have become so polarized that it doesn’t feel like you can stand on one side of the line and actually communicate with a person standing just on the other side anymore. It feels like yelling across the Grand Canyon.
You can’t hear them. They can’t hear you. You’re both just running your mouths at the same time with zero hope of communication.
And that sense of hopelessness is what I hear echoed over and over from my friends.
At the same time as the election has been unfolding, I’ve also been listening to Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. And, you guys, this book feels like an even more timely addition to the conversation now than when the book was published last year.
Kyr has spent her whole life on Gaia Station, a fascist society bent on revenge.
And her society has good reason for their anger. A generation ago, Earth and most of its billions were destroyed by a galactic society that does the will of The Wisdom, a godlike AI the aliens have created to make decisions resulting in the least possible suffering.
Destroying Earth may have theoretically netted the least suffering, but it’s still genocide. And when your people are the ones whose home and species have been wiped out, you’re going to be seething with righteous fury.
And Kyr is seething. She’s spent her whole life training for revenge, awaiting the day when she’ll become an adult and be assigned to join the ranks of rebel soldiers. But when her assignment comes, Kyr doesn’t receive a military posting. Instead, she’s sent to Nursery. Humanity needs the genetic advantage of Kyr’s war-breed DNA in bearing sons–future soldiers who will grow up to be even stronger than Kyr herself.
Despite her dislike of children, her lack of interest in sex, and her derision of the nursery women as the lowest of the low in Gaia station’s social hierarchy, Kyr intends to bite the bullet and accept her assignment. Until she discovers that her brother’s assignment is even worse–a suicide bombing that will take out not enemy aliens, but the remnant of human civilians who have surrendered and live peacefully under alien rule.
Instead of accepting her nursery assignment, Kyr takes an alien prisoner and her brother’s programmer friend and escapes Gaia station, intent on diverting her brother’s bombing efforts to a new target. Why blow up the remnant of humanity when you could destroy The Wisdom itself?
But Kyr’s companions aren’t as helpless as they seem. Her brother’s motives are nothing like she imagined. Gaia Station and its commander aren’t what Kyr believes them to be either. And most surprisingly, neither is The Wisdom.
This is where things get dark. Like, murder-suicide, galactic scale genocide, more-greusome-than-average sci-fi violence and more. But it’s also where the plot gets interesting.
Up until this point, you think this novel is just your average angry feminist sci-fi action story. Which is fun. But not exactly unique or thought-provoking. Then the midpoint happens and blows your mind.
This is not your average action novel, after all. It suddenly starts to tackle huge philosophical themes. The feminism gets less vicious and more nuanced. There are grey areas. There is empathy for both sides. There is no perfect solution. But there is hope.
Don’t get me wrong. This story is still packed with plenty of heart pounding action scenes and space-opera style politics. But I think what will appeal to readers, at least in these difficult times, is the story of a young person raised with extreme views who, through life experience, begins to question, to reconsider the values she was raised with, and to come to a place of empathy for both sides while still taking action.
In this day and age, an ending that isn’t all about violence is, in itself, a beacon of hope.
And I think maybe politics can only get as intensely polarized as it is in the U.S. today when the issues are dumbed down and oversimplified.
I hope everyone reads this excellent work of science fiction, and I hope it pushes people on both sides of the political divide to at least consider the issues at hand in a more nuanced way. Because in the nuances and the grey areas, that’s where real conversation can happen.
