Some Desperate Glory

“Who are the humans?”

This is the opening line of Some Desperate Glory. It posits a non-human intelligence capable of evaluating humanity from the outside—a form of defamiliarization common to the science-fiction genre. The question of what it means to be human is one of the novel’s central concerns. Humanity’s capacities for violence and empathy are contrasted to highlight how humans are a product of their environment as much as their genetic material.

“Human histories and media are full of ‘soldiers’ and ‘heroes’—individuals who perform acts of violence for the sake of their tribe—and astonishingly, these are considered admirable.”

Here again, the non-human writer allows the author to engage in defamiliarization. This fictional writer has not been subject to the centuries of acculturation that make war seem normal to humans, and they are therefore able to see—and make readers see—the strangeness of glorifying violence and death.

“The sky lit up with green surreal flashes as a Wisdom cruiser dropped out of shadowspace.”

This is the opening line of Chapter 1. It subtly alludes to the first line of William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”; however, Tesh changes it so that the sky is green. Neuromancer is about artificial intelligences that can be compared to the Wisdom technology in Some Desperate Glory.