Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh at Strange Horizons

Readers with an encyclopedia memory of my work may recall that I already wrote about Emily Tesh's second novel, in brief, in a Guardian reviews roundup in May. Strange Horizons were good enough to offer me space to give the novel a more extended view. 

In her Hugo-winning novel Some Desperate Glory (2023), Emily Tesh tore through many of the conventions that govern modern, popular SF. Barrelling through a trilogy's worth of plot in a single novel, playing merry hell with time and space, nodding at the familiar structure of the YA novel of self-discovery and self-actualization before thoroughly upending it, the novel seemed determined to confound the reader's expectations at every turn. In one respect, however, Some Desperate Glory hewed closely to the familiar form of a YA adventure. As its heroine, Kyr, uncovered the lies she had been raised on and rebelled against them, the teachers who promulgated those lies inevitably took a background role: sometimes villainous, sometimes supportive, but always a backdrop to Kyr’s starring turn.

In her new novel, The Incandescent, Tesh overturns this last, and perhaps most cherished, of conventions. What if you told a magical school story, she asks, from the point of view of the teacher? Like the best ideas, this one feels at once revolutionary and obvious. Even if you’re not a teacher, even if you left school decades ago and never looked back, it must at some point have occurred to you how different the story of that period in your life would have looked from behind the desk at the front of the class; how experiences that felt earth-shattering to a person going through them for the first time would have seemed like yet another repetition of a familiar tale to someone with a bit more life behind them; how what you were sure were cherished secrets and private dramas were in fact fully visible from a different vantage point. To take that change in perspective and apply it to a familiar fantasy tale is an enormously fruitful idea, and this is at once The Incandescent's strength and weakness. This is a novel with a great deal to say: about fantasy and the magical school story, but also about teaching, about class, and about how they intersect with each other. It can lose itself a little in trying to say all of it.

It's interesting to have two opportunities to write about the same work in such different formats. A capsule review forces you to cut to the chase, and if there's a single takeaway from my thoughts about The Incandescent it's that this is one of the best fantasy novels of 2025. At a greater length, however, I can not only look at the places where the novel is wobbly, but take a closer look at how it achieves its aims, and what it's saying about class and education that so much of the dark academia genre is missing.