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Sam Danis: Hi. I am Sam, Audible’s sci-fi and fantasy editor. And I am just over the moon today to be speaking with Emily Tesh, author of Some Desperate Glory, an absolutely unpauseable space opera and her debut full-length novel. Her previous work includes the Greenhollow Duology, which is made up of the novellas Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country, which I also highly recommend you go listen to ASAP. Welcome and thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, Emily.

Emily Tesh: Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm very glad to be here.

SD: So, I just finished Some Desperate Glory a couple days ago. I'm experiencing one of the worst book hangovers I've had in a while. Do not know what to go to next.

ET: Sorry!

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SD: No. Please, please don't be. It was fantastic. I truly loved it. And I wanted to get into just how much is going on in this story. It could kind of be called dystopian sci-fi; it'd also be fair to describe it as a space opera, military sci-fi, time travel, multiverse story, a reflection on family and belonging. There are so many twists and turns in this novel, as soon as I thought I knew what kind of story this was going to be, the ground just shifted beneath my feet in the best way. I'm so curious where the writing process began. What was kind of the earliest seed of this story?

ET: Funnily enough, just last night I was looking back through my drafts folder, so I can tell you an exact date. It was August 2017 when I opened up this untitled document that I found somewhere at the bottom of my Gdocs and discovered the character Mags, who is the protagonist Kyr’s brother in the book, the final version of the book, the book that is published. He was originally the protagonist. So, way, way back I had this, I think, interest in examining the idea of humanity from the outside and humanity as not the neutral option but as a species whom other species would regard as terrifying, as frightening. And I thought, "Well, surely that story needs to be about a young man." Because if you're looking at sort of humans’ capacity to be terrifying, it is often young men who have both that physical strength and potential for acts of violence.

And some of it, of course, is writing as a woman and writing as someone who has had, you know, “This is how you protect yourself,” the talks, the warnings, and I think a lot of men don't realize what it's like to go through life in a world where half your own species is a potential threat to you. And of course, most men are not in any way threatening, but you don't know which ones are. Anyway, so the very origin of the story was always about gender, I suppose. It was always about how human beings perceive each other and how they might be perceived by someone who is outside our norms. But also, in the very first version of the story, I didn't dare to do a female protagonist. And I remember the moment I switched, because I wrote what ended up as the opening scene of the book, which is Kyr in the Agoge generated simulation, sort of hologram simulation, of the combat sequence. I wrote that scene with Mags, word for word, and then I finished it and I reread it and I thought, “This would be so much better if it was about the awful sister.”

SD: I love that.

ET: It’s true, I switched it, I just switched the pronouns just to experiment, and a character who had been fairly flat suddenly leapt off the page and I thought, "Oh this is, this is, this is..." You can feel as a writer when it clicks.

SD: That's so interesting to me, because Kyr as a character is such a presence throughout the novel. Characters point out to her that she is scary. She's this big formidable presence, and I think it's so interesting that she was there in the corner at first like, "No. It's me. It's me."

ET: It also became clearer to me as I got to know the character of Mags better that actually his main trait is “I would rather not,” which is not actually a good character trait for a protagonist. You want the lead character of your book to want to do things.

SD: Right. I love that. So, let's get into Kyr a little bit. She's your main character. She's a teenager who has grown up believing that her people are kind of the last of humanity, that a war is ongoing between humans and aliens, known as the majo in this story, and that she and her peers are basically destined to bring vengeance to the humans. In reality—this is where I give a spoiler alert—that's all kind of wrong. She's an unwitting member of what's really kind of an extremist holdout group. So, redemption seems to be a big theme that runs throughout this story. Tell me about writing that main character who has to go through such a big redemption arc.

"It was difficult to write a character who sucks that much."

ET: It was difficult. It was difficult to write a character who sucks that much. I knew from the first that what I wanted to do was a redemption arc. I was interested in many ways in a dystopian setting, but I was interested in hope and the hope of change and the hope that people can change. And I do truly believe that people can change and it's very important to me that people are capable of being better. I think I had also recently been watching The Good Place, which is a TV show that examines a similar idea that even people who suck quite a lot can change.

SD: That makes a lot of sense.

ET: There's, well, lots of sort of parallel universes and time travel stuff as well. I think the influence is noticeable once I've said it. It's there.

SD: I can totally see it, yeah.

ET: So, I was interested in writing about a character who gets better, and that means starting with an unlikable protagonist, a villain. And of course it's not unusual in genre fiction to have an unlikable protagonist. It's just they're always boys. And, actually, I found that people reacted really, really strongly to a female character who was the worst. Either they didn't get it. I had early readers going, "Oh, she's all right, really." And I was like, "I haven't made it clear enough that she sucks." And I had to go back and make her worse, because reader assumptions with female characters are so much about the likable, the relatable, unless you point out, "No. She's a bully. Here it is in chapter two,” people actually miss it. I had to make her really, really obviously the worst.

And then also people were harsher, I think, with this female character who sucks than they might be with an equivalent male character. Perhaps because there's less to compare to, not to say there's nothing to compare to. There's been some amazing work done with antiheroines, as it were. The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson is a good example. But I think reader expectations for, especially teenage girl protagonists, are heavily influenced by the YA genre, where the teen girl protagonist is a kind of everywoman figure, meant to be projected on in many cases, or at least loved, related to, and that wasn't at all what I was doing.

SD: Right. And I have to admit, when I first wrote these questions, the word “unlikable” was in there. But I didn't want to offend you.

ET: No. You're not meant to like her. I'd be worried if you did. She's really, really awful.

SD: She's really tough to root for in the beginning, but you trust that it's going somewhere and you trust that she's maybe about to figure something out about herself, which is kind of the interesting part about a protagonist that experiences just that much change throughout the course of the story. And it's interesting that you bring up YA, because this is very much not a YA novel even though the character is quite young. But you're absolutely right, in YA stories it's often this character you can side with immediately. They're a little bit of a rebel. They don't quite fit into their world. Kyr fits in her world, which makes it I think so hard when things shift for her.

ET: I intentionally did put in the reader-point-of-view character, the person who is a little bit of a rebel and who can see that things aren't right. And it's the character Avi, who is Kyr's best friend/worst enemy. It's complicated. And I put him in from the first intending him to be the character where the reader goes, "Ah, finally someone who gets it."

He's worse than Kyr. There is one thing I want to be really clear about in this book is there's no one in this militarized death cult who is immune to propaganda. There is no one who has escaped it or avoided it. All of these children, and they are children, have been taught that every problem must be solved with violence and they've internalized it, and even when they try to get away from it, they can't. And in a way that's what, to me, makes it an adult book rather than YA. I would expect the adult reader to look at it and not go, “I identify with this character” but “this character is a kid.”

SD: Right. Yep. This character is a kid and there's something terribly wrong happening here. So, getting into a little bit of the deeper process behind writing these characters, the five sections of this novel kind of begin with excerpts from various in-universe histories of humanity, of the majo, of the war. You get these little glimpses of how all these happenings have been distilled in the end. You're a teacher, is that right? Of ancient Greek and Latin?

ET: I am. Yes.

SD: Which is really interesting. That means your knowledge of human civilization goes back a little bit. How did you feel like your expertise about history and kind of all its perils informed how you approached this story?

ET: Ah. Deeply is the short answer. I think some of what I was doing came from reading some lovely books, wonderful books of science fiction, which imagined a progressive future. Especially that the queer norm future, this idea that the world will just keep getting better, that you look up into space, “space is gay!” That made me happy, and yet it also made me worried. It made me think, "Are you watching the news? Do you know what people are like? Have you met humans?" I think in some ways I find that the utopian dream of the future depressing, because it seems to me to take too much for granted. And with Some Desperate Glory, I was really interested in constructing a plausible history, not a plausible technology. I freely admit that the science part of the science fiction makes no sense. It runs on narrativium. I don't care about that. It exists to serve the story, but the history mattered to me a lot.

So, I thought about how humans would react to the appearance of an alien culture that was more powerful than theirs. And I looked at historical instances of that happening. I thought about language a great deal and culture and nation. I think it actually extraordinarily unlikely that in any near future Earth's nations stop mattering, because many of the sort of cultures, civilizations, nations around the world have histories that go back millennia, and those matter to people and that deep connectedness to the past matters to people. So I thought, "Well, I can't imagine a world in which humans stop having conflicts." I really can't, because actually conflict is part of what people are. That we are different to each other and therefore can disagree with each other, and in a way a world without conflict would be tragic. It’s a world where no one was different and where no one had different needs or different beliefs, where all these things have been flattened out into universal agreements, and that made me sad to imagine.

And so Gaea Station is a culture which has been flattened in that way, where everybody agrees and everybody is on the same side and everybody is completely committed to the same set of political goals. And I wanted to be clear, I think that's a dystopia. I think that's a horrific dystopia. There's a great line in, I think it's Terry Pratchett, actually, where a character says to the patrician of Ankh-Morpork—great books by the way; do read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld—the character says, "We must all pull together." And he says, "Oh, I hope not. Free men pull in all directions." And that actually, I think, is very powerful and very true. Part of freedom is the freedom to differ enormously.

So, in Some Desperate Glory, I was also really interested in language and language history. So, the little bits of sort of in-universe nonfiction were treats for me, the writer, at the start of every section being like, "Oh, I can do a fun bit." They're fun for me. I'm not sure all the readers will find them fun but I found them very fun. So the bit at the start of section three is a bit of language history, and it imagines how human language might change and develop in a world where, first, we go to space and we communicate with aliens and we have to keep communicating with each other. But people don't want to let go of their languages, and actually language history and language rootedness is so important to a sense of what a culture is. And when you set out to destroy a culture, genocidal attempts in the past have absolutely targeted language, because you destroy a people's language, you destroy their history, you destroy their sense of self. So I imagined that there would be another bit of convenient narrative technology, a translator technology, but that language has to be simplified to access that. So the characters of Gaea Station, of this death cult, speak a language called T Standard, Terran Standard, which is essentially a simplified, flattened, culturally emptied form of English.

"All of these children, and they are children, have been taught that every problem must be solved with violence and they've internalized it, and even when they try to get away from it, they can't. And in a way that's what, to me, makes it an adult book rather than YA."

But that doesn't mean other languages don't exist, that what the characters would call classical English doesn't exist. I imagined a dialect of galactic Chinese, I imagined a new Swahili, and it seemed to me that the multiplicity of language is a part of the glorious multiplicity of humanity. And Kyr's own language and her narrative is so blunt, so simple, that when she is trying to express what it feels like to stand in front of an ocean that is turning gold and feel your heart breaking because you've never understood the sky before and everything you knew was a lie, all she can say is it tastes like salt. She hasn't got words.

SD: Right. There's a bit, too, where she's kind of for the first time communicating with one of the majo, one of the aliens where they're asking her a ton of questions and she just doesn't have the answer to all of them and she's so overwhelmed by the fact that anyone would want this much information and want to communicate this much, which I found both funny—it was a little bit of a comic break—but also interesting because she just doesn't have the words. Like you said, she doesn't have the experience and the context to really understand why someone would be that curious about the world.

On a personal note, my spouse is a linguist so I have asked him multiple times, "Well, what happens when we go to Mars? How is language going to evolve?" So, I'm right there with you. I think this part of sci-fi is very, very fun. Getting into language, it's an interesting segue, I want to talk a little bit about the narration. This is narrated by Sena Bryer, who is a relatively newer voice. She's narrated a couple things on our site. I think her performance is just impeccable here. She not only captures all the kind of raw and heightened emotion of such a twisty, turny, high-stakes listen, she offers such nuance to the characters of all genders, ages, and alien races. What were you hoping for in the narration of your work?

ET: I actually had a very, very clear voice in my head for Kyr very early on, because one of the backstory bits, the influences, if you like, of the book is the Mass Effect series of video games, in which the protagonist in the female version, Commander Shepard, is performed in spectacular style by the legend Jennifer Hale, who is truly one of the great voice actors out there. And Jennifer Hale does such an amazing performance as this space badass. And that was in my head, but also Kyr is 17. She's not a space badass. She just kind of wishes she was, and she's really convinced that if she tries hard enough she can persuade herself and everyone else. So what I was hoping for in a narrative performance was someone who got into that contradiction between absolutely the ass-kicking sci-fi heroine, the powerful and dangerous and exciting sort of action science fiction, and the vulnerability of the teenage girl who's out in the world alone for the first time and she doesn't really understand anything that's going on.

And I remember hearing Sena's audition tape and it was only I think a single scene from chapter two, it's actually the scene where Kyr bullies some younger girls in an attempt to enforce the rules. She's very keen on enforcing rules. It makes her feel important and powerful. It makes her feel like she's doing the right thing and Kyr is obsessed with doing the right thing, but Sena got it. She got Kyr's combination of toughness and naivety perfectly. And that's what I wanted.

SD: That's great. That's a memorable scene and it comes back throughout the story. And I love that that's the one that landed Sena the role. She does such a fantastic job, I think, capturing that vulnerability and that youth, but also the strength that Kyr maybe at first thinks she has, and then grows to embody in a way she probably didn't imagine. I wanted to talk about the voice of the majo a little bit.

ET: So, essentially, I always imagined Yiso language—I've said before I'm obsessed with the use of language—I imagine them as not a native speaker and I imagine them as not actually having human vocal cords. And I said up front to the audiobook producer, “Can you make them alien?” And Sena was so immediately creative, and it's honestly exciting to work with a performer, because I'm not one. I wouldn't know where to start with creating an alien voice but she had ideas right away. So I sent some suggestions about creating a voice that wasn't human. I thought about Yisos' musicality. They sound musical to Kyr because their own natural register of their language is full of clicks and whistles. They belong to a species which communicates primarily through sound, is less focused on vision than humans are. And then beyond that I was like, "I don't know how you're going to do it but if you can do it that would be really cool." And the audiobook team just ran with it.

SD: That is awesome. We ask the impossible of our narrators and it blows my mind. They deliver. Your previously published duology of novellas, Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country, were very much in the realm of fantasy I'd say. What do you feel took you in the direction of sci-fi for this one?

ET: I was bored is the short answer. I get bored very easily. The next book is going to be something very different again. But doing those two historical fantasy romances back-to-back, the well was empty on historical fantasy romance. I was like, "All right. I've done that. Time to do something else." But also with Kyr's story with Some Desperate Glory, there were some specific things I wanted to say and I wanted to talk about, things that worry me, I suppose, about propaganda and radicalization, and science fiction seemed like a better vessel for it, or maybe science fantasy is the word. As I said before, the technology is only sort of vaguely plausible. I think I am really at heart a fantasy writer.

What I find interesting about fantasy is the way in which you can use the structure of the world you've created to underline, to open up the themes that you're interested in. So, in the Greenhollow Duology, the magical wood stands in as a symbol for the painful stasis that the main character of the first book has found himself in. It's both a place where he's safe and a place where he's never going to change and never going to grow, and it's only when he finally leaves, he can begin to actually grow as a human being again. That was so delightful to write. It is so satisfying to do that very standard SFF trick of making the metaphor completely literal. But in Kyr's story, the things I wanted to explore didn't seem to belong in a fantasy universe, or in fact will just take too much explaining in a fantasy universe. I didn't want to sit down and explain the history of fascism in a secondary-world fantasy when we've already got fascism, and I think readers tend to know what it is already.

SD: Yeah. That's really interesting. That story feels right at home in space in a sci-fi future, the utter terrifying concept of Earth being destroyed, of being kind of lost in space with this tiny little enclave that ends up being radicalized. I think you were right to explore. I'm glad you got bored. It worked out well.

ET: Wait till you see the next one.

SD: I can't wait. And I'm going to ask you about it. But I wanted to get at a theme that kind of runs through your Duology, as well as Some Desperate Glory, which is tackling queer love identity. The importance of connection and found family. I'm a listener who identifies as bi, so this kind of representation has been so important for me to see in my genre and I think we're seeing so much more of it and it's just making my heart sing. I want “space is gay” on a t-shirt. What do you hope listeners connect with in your work?

ET: Some of the reviews, the feedback that has moved me most for the Greenhollow books has been from queer people, from gay men, from people of all genders, saying, "I felt seen. This was a fantasy of happiness that felt like it meant something to me.” And that really moved my heart the times I heard it. Kyr is a little different. If Greenhollow was, I think, in many ways comfort fiction, and I say that with love. I love comfort fiction. I delight in being comforted in a world that is often sad and bad. I think comfort is a great thing. But Some Desperate Glory is perhaps discomfort fiction. It goes to some very dark places. It deals with some very difficult themes and there is no romance arc, as such. I think a reader who goes in hoping for a romance will be very disappointed. And there is no clear resolution to some things, but to me Some Desperate Glory is a very, very queer story, and Kyr is a very, very queer character.

"I hope that the character can speak to people who have had that experience of confusion, of queerness, not as part of a romance story but as part of the self. I think it matters. I think it matters quite a lot."

And I use that word advisedly. I am a queer person myself. Kyr is a character who exists in a society which is trying to define her by biological gender and that definition is destroying her. She is a character whose desires don't match what people expect them to be. She has romantic desires in the book. Where she has them, they are occasionally for other human women. I would say most strongly of all, her romantic feelings are for the alien Yiso, although she never acknowledges it explicitly. She repeatedly rejects sexual feelings. I remember a conversation early on with my editor and the marketing team where I said, "You cannot say this character is a lesbian. I will be really, really cross." The rep here is ace-ish, but “it's complicated and I hate labels and I'm really uncomfortable with my gender and I don't want to talk about it.” The short form of that is “queer.” I hope that the character can speak to people who have had that experience of confusion, of queerness, not as part of a romance story but as part of the self. I think it matters. I think it matters quite a lot.

SD: It definitely matters.

ET: It's also absolutely a story about how punishing it is for young people to be trapped in a bio-essentialist society. I have worked with trans youth. That, too, was a story that was important for me to tell.

SD: It's a very important story and to your point, yes, it's not a queer love story but it's a queer identity story, and we go through the journey with Kyr. And, like you said, we don't necessarily end up at a nice neat resolution with labels, but to experience the kind of different stages she goes through in understanding what her identity may be and how there are possibilities beyond what's been drilled into her head from her society, it's a powerful story to hear. One of the aspects of Gaea Station is that there is a duty to propagate, to further humanity, and how does that intersect with being assigned female at birth. So there's a lot of turmoil that goes in there. Are there any stories that you would point out specifically that made you feel seen lately?

ET: An absolutely exquisite example of feeling seen and a wonderful “space is gay” book, highly recommend, is Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell, which is a book about a character who has worn out everyone's patience with him through his repeated failure to get his life together. A character who is screwed up, he's screwed up for no good reason, and he knows it. He's a poor little rich boy and he keeps making his own life worse and finally his powerful aunt—and in Maxwell's books, there's always a powerful aunt. I'm allowed to say that because we're personal friends—his powerful aunt is like, "Right. This is enough. I'm sending you into the military where you're going to have a forcible psychic bond with a senior officer who will keep you under control." And the setup is delightful, the romance is delightful, the adventure is delightful. I would say that it's a book that is sort of 66 percent space adventure, and then 33 percent romance. It’s brilliant. It's so much fun.

SD: It's a very fun book.

ET: It's so good. I read it a year before it was published. And I was like, "I can't talk to anyone about this. This is so unfair." What I think made me feel seen was the very thoughtful, very careful, development of the ways in which Tennal, this poor little rich boy, is a mess. And as a depiction of a character who is not mentally well, I've found it very comforting, actually. He's great. He's so much fun. He probably needs quite a lot of therapy and I think he could do with some mood stabilizers.

SD: I love that. I feel like that could describe a lot of main characters in fiction and that's what makes them interesting. They are us. I just have one final question, and you did kind of tease this earlier. Are there any more novels or novellas coming up in your future? Please say yes. Or what other creative endeavors do you have in the works?

ET: Well, there is a pandemic project that already exists, which I'm very, very excited about and cannot say too much about. It goes back to my love of the ancient world. It's history. It's dead languages. It's exploring tombs and archaeology. It's necromancy princesses. There's a lot of bones. It's a lot of fun stuff. So that exists.

SD: Amazing.

ET: The next full-length book I’ll publish is very different, again, because that one is a sort of full secondary-world high fantasy. And then the next one is something—I wouldn't call it urban fantasy. It's more like home counties fantasy, Buckinghamshire fantasy, which is a book I've wanted to write for years. A wizard-school book from the points of view of the teachers and it's a book about, imagine if the grown-ups in one of these—I mean the wizard-school story is a classic of the genre going back well past J.K. Rowling—imagine if any of these grown-ups did their jobs? Imagine even one risk assessment, one safeguarding report, just imagine. And from there it's spiraled to become what for me is an absolute delight of a palate cleanser after Some Desperate Glory. Imagine a kind of power fantasy of competent career-minded 30-somethings doing their jobs properly in a world of wizards and demons and children with magical powers, which is actually, as if teenagers weren't bad enough, you know?

SD: Right. All those hormones suddenly have somewhere to go. That is fantastic. I am marking my mental calendar for all of those. It sounds like such a fun range of things that you're tackling, and I can't wait. Well, that is all my questions for today. Thank you so, so much for taking the time to chat with me, Emily.

ET: Well, thank you. I've really enjoyed our conversation. And I'm really glad you enjoyed the book.

SD: I absolutely can't wait for listeners to meet Kyr and hear Sena and experience the wonderful book hangover that I'm in right now. Listeners, you can pick up Some Desperate Glory right now on Audible.