Some Desperate Glory
I’m not even writing about comps any more. Now it’s just book reviews. I forget where I found this one, but I managed to thoroughly these Baby Fascists in Space. Don’t worry, they don’t stay fascists. Other than a fun plot, it’s hard to identify what about this I enjoyed so much. It’s some solid science fiction about a contingency of humans who are absolutely falling into the “Humans are Space Orcs” trope, preparing their youth for the inevitable rise and return of humanity against the aliens who got sick of their shit and took them down a peg. It’s got misogyny, racism, and good old fashioned brainwashing to round out just how stellar these fuckers are. And right in the middle of it is the kid about to find out her whole little universe is a sham.
You know, it’s a good book. Just go read it. Instead I want to dive into an observation I made while a decent portion of the way through this story and how I let it influence my writing.
By this point in my “search for comps” I had come across plenty of series, serials, anthologies, and trilogies. All these books telling me I needed to care about the poor wee baby characters I was being introduced to, without doing anything more than telling me “you should care about them, trust me bro!” Gideon the Ninth is the obvious exception, but as we discussed that was my launch pad. Following that masterpiece I was stuck wading through some lackluster character growth.
So when I paused in reading Some Desperate Glory and turned to my wife to say “Somehow, she’s made me actually care about these characters in the same number of pages (or less) than Becky Chambers failed to make me care.” And thus, I started digging into what makes someone care about a character deeply over the course of a book that would never have a sequel.
Theres really only one of these books. The story is fun, and the characterization is alright, but it was the first book in a hot minute that I realized managed to set up a story, get me invested in the characters, and wrap it all up efficiently in just the one novel. And I’m an engineer. I love efficiency. So how did the author do that?
I wanted to pick apart the details that seemed to make a difference.
I think the best point to examine is the way the side characters were developed. Sure, anyone can make a main character, and if you spend enough pages on it, that character might have depth. But how do you make a side character more than a carboard cutout standing in for the main to pantomime with? There were a decent smattering of side characters here, and you know what, there’s more than a smattering of side characters in Small Angry Plant or NeoG, and I didn’t give a rats furry ass about any of them.
Maybe the author took the time to develop entire backgrounds and side stories for these characters. I had an exercise in grade school where we had to create a character, starting with a full profile: What they looked like, what sort of pets they had, who their parents were, all the way down to their favorite breakfast food. Then we had to write a story about them where clearly most of those details didn’t need to be included. I did this in maybe 5th grade, but I found myself trying it all over again as I started in on my sequel where I wanted there to be more characters, branching out into a multitude of interpersonal relationships and an ensemble cast. But I didn’t want to have the side characters just be props for my main.
So maybe that is what Emily Tesh did. Maybe she secretly parsed out full character bios for the handful of girls in the main character’s little training cohort. Maybe she put the extra calories into the alien’s personality to make it a sympathetic creature. It felt like it. There were certainly pain points, but I might hope any other reader would extend me a modicum of grace for small mistakes. Overall, this book had a solid grasp on how to make me care.
The only drawback here is how gay this book was. It clearly wanted to be “very” and clearly suffered from an inability to be as gay as we wanted it. The main has an unrealized crush and FAR MORE IMPORTANT problems to solve than the fact that she is strangely possessive of one of her teammates. There is a briefest of respite and normalcy that grants her the opportunity to recognize her mutual attraction to her friend, but then it’s gone in a flash of multiverse lighting, where they hardly kiss.
Okay, so I needed to take a break while writing this post. I started it months ago, and then eagerly snagged up a different Emily Tesh novel because I was excited to see what else she can give me. And this other one (The Incandescent) was way gayer and scoring MASSIVE points with me… until it wasn’t. and I got all mad and pouty and decided I hated the whole of her work. That is, decidedly, unfair. She does good work.
So while I put the calories into growing my own maturity as an individual, I sat and put some thought into what I was reading. I’ll have to land it in a different post but I think I need to acknowledge that what I am looking for in my science fiction simply does not exist. I can have great science fiction, great story telling, and mediocre gayness. I can have mediocre gayness and crappy Sci-Fi. I think there is a lack of really good scifi with really good lesbians-in-space. I need to help fix this.
Mixed all in the middle of this issue is the fact that maybe publishers (major publishers) aren’t actually ready for high quality gay content. It leaks through in the gaps on the pages where I can see that maybe an author wanted it to be gayer, and maybe they tried, but some editor said “well, they can be gay, but, like, not that gay… tone it down.” And maybe that is the true villain of all these frustrated blog posts I keep writing.
I’ll have to revisit The Incandescent at a later date. I didn’t finish it because I was Big Mad. It was alright, but it suffered from an excess of what I will assume is editor intervention.
So to recap: Some Desperate Glory. One-shot, standalone about multiverse theory, human space-orcs, baby space fascists and the discovery that not only can you also kiss girls, but you can smear racist, demagogue rapists across 13 dimensions. Good times.
AZ ROZKILLIS 