Some Desperate Glory

Some Desperate Glory is a science fiction novel by the American writer Emily Tesh, and her first full-length novel after a pair of novellas. It follows Kyr, an elite human soldier raised in a human outpost and prepared from childhood to avenge a destroyed Earth.

Decades before the story opens, Earth was destroyed and fourteen billion humans died in the war against the majo, a group made up of several alien species. Most of the humans who survived have been absorbed into majo society, while a small number hold out at the separatist Gaea Station under Commander Aulus Jole. Valkyr, known as Kyr, has grown up on the station under a system that assigns every adult a role in combat, reproduction or support, and she has believed the version of the past she was taught without ever testing it. When Command gives her brother a posting he will not survive and her objections change nothing, she begins to look into what the station is actually doing, and the history she finds does not match the one she was raised on. What the station has told its people about the end of Earth, and about the weapon that ended the war, turns out to be a story with a purpose.

The novel takes a first-contact story and tells it from the losing side of an old war: the humans Kyr grew up among are remnants rather than a power, and the weapon that decided the fighting belongs to somebody else. Tesh had written fantasy novellas before this book, and Gaea Station is her first full-length setting.