dulce, decorum, etc

[jazzfish]

I'm reading Emily Tesh's new space opera Some Desperate Glory. This is very very clearly intended as a pointed commentary on overly-militarized milsf space operas. I hadn't grasped just how pointed it was going to be until about midway through chapter 2:

Cleo laughed a hard little laugh and said, "Where's the lecture? Sweet and meet, right? Shouldn't I be longing to die for a dead world?"

_It is sweet and meet to die for your fatherland_: old Earth poem, which they'd all learned by heart in Nursery.

OOF. That, y'all, is How It's Done.

(Exegesis: a contemporary reader thinks of Wilfred Owen's antiwar "Dulce et Decorum Est". But Cleo, and Kyr the narrator, are talking about the poem that Owen's referencing, one of Horace's Odes, which waxes, well, poetic, about the virtue of that very sentiment.)

Comments

[reedrover]

Interesting!

[yomikoma]

I just finished this last night, so good. Afterwards I lioked up the title and discovered it’s from line -3 of the Owen poem.

[jazzfish]

I also just finished it last night! And yes, SO GOOD. By far the best thing I've read this year.

And, ha, of course the title's from Owen's poem, I should have caught that myself. Read your own links, McKinnon.