“While Earth’s children live, the enemy shall fear us.”
Kyr (Valkyr to, well, not her friends, since she doesn’t actually have any), has been raised to be the perfect soldier. One of the last of the genetically-tailored Warbreed, she’s faster, stronger, and a better fighter than almost everyone else on Gaea Station (the last holdout of humanity), with the exception of her twin brother Mags. Her entire life has been spent learning to be even faster, stronger, and better, and forcing her teammates to do the same so she and her fellow soldiers can defeat the Majoda army and reclaim the universe for humanity.
Then Kyr finds out that everything she’s ever been told was a lie. Oh, except for the fact that the Majoda won the war by destroying Earth and all fourteen billion people on it. That’s entirely true. And in case anyone’s tempted to forget, they can run the Doomsday simulation in the agoge – the station’s reality-bending machine – and try to stop it. Over. And over. Again.
The last thing Kyr saw was the antimatter explosion beginning; the death of her world, just as she had seen it happen hundreds of times before.
Emily Tesh’s decision to show everything from Kyr’s point of view is an engaging way to tell the story, because Kyr is awful. She believes in the CAUSE of Gaea station, and every part of her life is about beating the Majoda, which means everyone else’s life around her needs to be the same. Or else. No relaxing, no slacking, no horsing around, get better. Early on we see a charming scene of Kyr forcing a twelve-year-old girl lick mop water off the floor for the crime of splashing too much (and kind of enjoying getting to be right about it), and you can just imagine how dismissive she is of same-sex attraction since it’s against the rules, it doesn’t have anything to do with fighting the war, and it doesn’t even result in more soldiers.
At the beginning of the story, Kyr’s relationship with the women on her team (the Sparrows) is even more fraught than usual, because they’re all about to receive their lifetime assignments. Everyone has a duty to serve: fighter, science tech, or the honor of being placed in the Nursery, to carry the sons of the men in the Command division and raise the next generation of soldiers for Gaea…
Yeah, you can imagine where this is going. A lifetime spent training to be a perfect solder, all for nothing because the important thing is passing along those precious genes.
You might become a great soldier, but you would only be one. We need many more.
This book is a real study of how systems of control are used to break people down and make them obedient, even fanatic. Exhaustion, privation, isolation, and complete and total control of information. History isn’t written by the winners, it’s written by the leaders. Winning, losing, scraping together supplies and sending badly-fed children into battle, none of that matters as long as you control the narrative.
It doesn’t take Kyr long to see how things are for her team member assigned to Nursery to realize that “bearing children” is really just an excuse, and to understand how she’s going to be used if she accepts. Trigger warning for rape; we don’t see it happen, or even hear someone describing it, but it’s abundantly clear that’s what the women of Nursery are really for. The situation on Gaea is also a fantastic example of an entire system of control that benefits only the leaders, and usually in such meaningless, small ways. I mean really, power? Slightly more luxuries? The ability to have sex with whoever, with no consequences? Compared to their stated goal of Saving Humanity, the actual desires of the leaders couldn’t be more pitiful if they demanded a later bedtime and all the ice cream they can eat.
And Kyr still believes in the cause of Gaea, and in Gaea’s leader, the war hero Aulus Jole. Finding out her brother Mags has been sent on a suicide mission to a planet of “collaborators” (humans living in harmony with the alien races of the Majoda) is the perfect excuse to…give Command a better solution! (Not running away, never that.) She’s going kidnap a Majo prisoner and use their ship to bring along a dissatisfied scientist to save her brother, assassinate the Majo’s Prince of Wisdom, and destroy their Wisdom machine that can reshape reality (and is responsible for destroying Earth) and win the war for Gaea on her terms.
And this is the point where it’s really hard to talk about the book without spoilers, because everything goes perfectly, and everything goes even more horrifyingly than I imagined, and literally everything changes.
None of this was real. All of it was real.
In the afterward, Emily Tesh describes the Wisdom (and the shadowspace technology it uses) as running on “purest narrativium”. And it does get a lot handwavey at times, both what it can do and how it’s controlled. It makes for scenes of dreamlike spaces, gardens in the center of a space station, and the thrill of running an obstacle course in mid air between shadowspace drives that bend gravity and alter reality. But what the Wisdom really is, is a sentient god-machine that can do anything and alter the universe to try to make things better.
Better for who? That depends on who’s currently deciding what “better” means. And that’s the entire point. The whole idea of how the Wisdom works is less important than what the person in control wants to do with it, and who they think will benefit from it.
The destruction of Earth was just one of the solutions created by an intelligence to improve life for everyone else in the universe; the reaction against that solution is worse, the possible alternatives all have their own problems. The only way to stop conflict is to stop the reasons for conflict, but how exactly do you do that? If all the differences between race and language and religion and sexual orientation and everything else that makes up a person is what’s causing the conflict, how do you eliminate that without creating something exactly like Gaea Station? Who’s version of “freedom” is allowed to flourish, keeping in mind that some people’s freedom means not having to think of other races as people. Don’t expect a story where everyone eventually comes together to save the universe; this is all about the problems of war on every level. All the options are bad, and every method to enforce every option is awful.
A peace brought about with the threat of violence is only a war in waiting.
Watching Kyr navigate all these questions, questioning her own reality and slamming into the realizations of who’s betrayed her and who she’s betrayed is a character study that made the book fly. Other reviews for this book have mentioned how important the concept of “deradicalization” is here, and I think that’s fair because I don’t think it’s as simple as Kyr being changed. It’s more that her own desire for justice and purpose and who she cares about has been forced into the narrowest path, and now suddenly it’s opened up into an entire universe of options.
This really is a stunning debut novel for Tesh, a space opera that’s not like anything I’ve seen before. The dialog snaps and sparks, relationships here are complicated (it’s possible to love and trust other people and still realize you don’t like them a whole lot and would also die for them), and there are about a hundred different flavors of lifetime trauma and enough spaceship battles and hand-to-hand combat that it never gets boring. The final chapter is a stunning image on top of an entire novel of stunning images, with a moment of heartbreak and beauty, and a friendship that I honestly found delightfully surprising.