The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet meets Ender's Game in this gripping science fiction debut from an award-winning voice in SFF.
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.
By Iris
After the fantasy novella duology that this author initially caught my attention with (Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country, also highly recommended if anyone wants to check them out!), this book is a massive departure from the whole atmospheric, folklore-ish vibe: Some Desperate Glory is an ambitious, dystopian science fiction novel that weighs in at around 500 pages.
The main character, Kyr, comes from a small, militaristic colony; the last “true children of Earth”, clinging to life on an increasingly impoverished space station built from a planetoid and a bunch of dreadnought spaceships. Kyr and her brother are genetically enhanced warriors, trained as elite fighters pretty much from birth. She is smart and fast, and she knows she is destined to avenge the destruction of Earth by an alien race – until a disastrous sequence of events turns Kyr’s entire life and beliefs upside down.
Kyr is not easy to like: she is harsh, convinced of her own superiority, only marginally aware of her privileged position, and more than a little ruthless. But she’s also a product of her upbringing, brainwashed by a totalitarian environment from the start. Watching her finally start to doubt the systems and beliefs she never thought to question before is an interesting (if at times frustrating) experience, and that’s really what this story does best: providing a fascinating insight into the mind of someone who is starting to realize that her people might not be the good guys after all.
