Some Desperate Glory

The novel begins with an excerpt from a fictional majoda (alien federation) guidebook, Humanity. It describes how humans found shadowspace technology without alien assistance. The guidebook notes that humans, especially young men, can be violent and that humans have male and female pronouns that they attach inappropriately to alien races like the lirem and zunimmer. Aliens find it strange that humans celebrate the violence of “war heroes.”

This is followed by a review of Humanity on a Chrysotheman network (which includes both humans and aliens). It warns readers against buying the guidebook, calling it a “pile of ignorant bioessentialist crap” (4).

Valkyr, who goes by “Kyr,” runs a simulation called Doomsday on the agoge, a virtual-reality system and a parallel-universe generator. She is in a war that occurred before she was born and is trying to prevent the majo (aliens) from destroying the Earth. Kyr uses a jump hook to navigate through shadowspace and gets on a spaceship carrying a bomb. She tries to disable the bomb, but the technology called the Wisdom stops her. She is shot in the simulation. Fourteen billion people on Earth die. This simulation is based on real events and programmed by Kyr’s uncle