| Title | : | The Light Brigade |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1481447963 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781481447966 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 356 |
| Publication | : | First published March 19, 2019 |
| Awards | : | Hugo Award Best Novel (2020), Locus Award Best SF Novel (2020), Arthur C. Clarke Award (2020), Premio Ignotus Mejor Novela Extranjera (2020), Goodreads Choice Award Science Fiction (2019), Dragon Award Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel (2019) |
Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.
Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero—or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference.
The Light Brigade Reviews
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I realized I might never know what really happened here. War was all about the annihilation of truth. Every good dictator and CEO knows that.
What a fabulous mind fuck.
I read this book because it came highly recommended, but I have to say I would not usually gravitate towards something called a "space opera". People and aliens fighting wars just doesn't seem that exciting to me. But this book is a thrill-ride. Seriously. It's fast-paced and compelling, it's mind-bendy and weird, and Dietz has such an interesting and endearing narrative voice that I had to know what happened.
Basically, it's the future and corporate giants rule, not only on a ruined Earth, but in space as well. Grueling training prepares soldiers like Dietz for battle against the independent settlers of Mars, who made millions of people - including Dietz's family - disappear from São Paolo."You accept reality," my father said. "This reality. That will keep you safe for now, my little mouse. But promise me that when you come of age you'll ask questions. Promise me you'll strive for some other future than the one we gave you."
In this future, technology allows people to travel at the speed of light. How? By breaking them down into atoms and turning them into light itself. Sound dangerous? It is. Soldiers don't always survive the journey, and others experience strange effects. Dietz is one of this latter group. After experiencing the first jump, Dietz is suddenly living the war in non-linear time.
The novel jumps around from missions that should have already happened to futures that Dietz shouldn't be experiencing. What emerges from Dietz having foreknowledge of the war is a completely different picture than the one being sold by the Corporate Corps. Piecing together the entire picture is a heart-pounding experience. I was horrified but I couldn't look away."It's important that we tell ourselves stories, Private Dietz. There's a theory that consciousness itself begins with story. Stories are how we make sense of the world."
Easily the most terrifying aspect of
The Light Brigade is how so much of the novel hits very close to home. Time travel aside, most of what happens is already happening and is extremely relevant today. War, fake news, climate change, corporate greed... this is our own world wrapped up a compulsively-readable sci-fi thriller. Highly recommended.
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4.5/5 stars
The Light Brigade is my first sci-fi read of the year (shocking, I know) and it’s also the first time I read Kameron Hurley’s book; I assure you it won’t be the last.
“I suppose it’s an old story, isn’t it? The oldest story. It’s the dark against the light. The dark is always the easier path. Power. Domination. Blind obedience. Fear always works to build order, in the short term. But it can’t last. Fear doesn’t inspired anything like love does.”
What do you do when you lose everything? Taking vengeance against the perpetrator seems to be the most common and logical path to follow. In this superbly written military sci-fi, The Blink has taken everything of importance away from Dietz in the blink—see what I did here?—of an eye. With mind completely concentrated on revenge, Dietz joined the corporate army. The Corps uses an advanced technology that’s able to break down any matter into particles of light—look at the cover art—and transfer them anywhere they want. After a case of desynchronized combat drop from the platoons, Dietz ends up experiencing war differently, leading to a stream of questions regarding sanity, time, freedom, and the purpose of war. In the journey towards becoming a Paladin, Dietz finds that the matter of being a hero isn't something as simple as exacting revenge or participating in a war that requires soldiers to follow orders with blind obedience.
“I believe there’s sometimes a greater evil that must be vanquished. But more often than we’d like to admit, there is no greater evil, just an exchange of one set of oppressive horrors with another. Wars are for old people. For rich people. For people protected by the perpetuation of horrors on others.”
From what I've heard throughout the years, military sci-fi isn't really what I’d call the most accessible sub-genre out there; some readers I know who love sci-fi have mentioned that the sci-fi weapons and tech commonly utilized in the sub-genre can be distracting and difficult to understand/visualize. No need to worry here; easy accessibility is definitely one of the most evident strengths in Hurley’s visceral storytelling. The Light Brigade is a military sci-fi that focuses on futuristic war; a prominent time travel element featuring multiple timelines also dominated the narrative. This novel could've easily been inaccessible to readers who are not invested in this particular sub-genre but I really don’t think that will be the case here. Hurley’s prose is very effective at making sure that readers will be able to follow what’s going on; even the tech and gadgets being used in the story were explained efficiently.
“Don’t tell me every revolution is peaceful. Revolutions rely on the tireless work of faceless masses whose lives mean so little individually that their names weren’t known to their movements even when alive.”
As if this novel hasn’t been crafted cleverly enough, Hurley implemented an absolutely brilliant take on creating a character that doesn’t require a gender label. Noticed that I haven’t mentioned Dietz’s gender in my review? There was almost no instance where Dietz was called or mentioned by gender. This reminded me of Martha Well’s All Systems Red, where the main character is a robot and there are no gender nouns to label it. Dietz is a character that would totally work with any gender that readers prefer and in my opinion, this was a super refreshing reading experience in SFF. Writing this review without calling Dietz by any gender pronouns was difficult enough, and I can’t even imagine the task of writing a full novel with this approach.
“The heroes were always the ordinary people who pursued extraordinary change.”
One last thing before I end my review. I’d like to talk about how relevant I found the passages and conflicts discussed in this book. The Light Brigade was written with so much emotion and passion; it felt to me like Hurley was truly pouring her feelings into every page. Just check out the first page if you don’t believe me; the first page alone hooked me immediately and it didn’t let up until the final page. War, conflicts, and the illusion of free choices were some of the most important themes being discussed and they were delivered with destructive impact. I highlighted a ridiculous amount of passages in this book and I truly wish I could just paste them all here. But for the sake of future readers' maximum enjoyment, I’ll refrain from doing so. The quote below is the last one that I’ll share, and I feel like this one really nails one of the problems we face regarding our past, present, and most likely, future society.
“The corps were rich enough to provide for everyone. They chose not to, because the existence of places like the labor camps outside Sao Paulo ensured there was a life worse than the one they offered. If you gave people mashed protein cakes when their only other option was to eat horseshit, they would call you a hero and happily eat your tasteless mash. They would throw down their lives for you. Give up their souls.”
This doesn’t mean that everything's grim here. Beneath all the deaths, hellfire, sorrow, war and gore, hope and love prevail in Dietz’s motivational journey for truth, freedom, justice, and peace. Exciting action scenes, easy accessibility, a totally clever plot, evocative characters, and compelling prose that offers resonating philosophical questions all combined to create an amazing novel. The Light Brigade was a tremendously addictive and intelligent military sci-fi that deserves to be read, reread, and remembered by every reader of the genre. I recommend this immensely entertaining book to any sci-fi enthusiast who loves reading a grim war story that’s balanced with humor, heart, and hope. Also, if you’ve read and loved All You Need is Kill (Edge of Tomorrow is the movie adaptation based on this), this incredibly engaging novel would be perfect for you.
“Don’t just fight the darkness, friends. Let’s be the light.” – Kameron Hurley
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Novel Notions -
“War was all about the annihilation of truth. Every good dictator and CEO knows that.”
Disclaimer: I am a card-carrying pacifist. I refuse to understand or accept any glorification or romanticization of war. War is hell, a meatgrinder of horror, and I firmly subscribe to the school of thought of “The worst peace is better than the best war”, as my mother often says.
So logically, I am usually not a big fan of military SF. I have to say straight up - I do not like the idea of strict military obedience and discipline. The idea of a boot camp meant to strip you of your own identity and remake you into a soldier meant to obey orders terrifies me. Achieving your goals through humiliation and denigration of a person is abhorrent. The rule of obedient aggression is a nightmare.“I still believe in the military. I believe there’s sometimes a greater evil that must be vanquished. But more often than we’d like to admit, there is no greater evil, just an exchange of one set of oppressive horrors with another. Wars are for old people. For rich people. For people protected by the perpetuation of horrors on others.”
This book, however, is vastly different and nothing at all like what I was expecting. Far from glorification of war and aggression and violence, it is a strong critique of it, a fight against the eternal fight, the denouncement of neverending war. War is hell and little else, no glorification needed here. It ended up being a brutal uncompromising mindfuck, condemning not just war itself, but rampant capitalism and greed and conditional human rights. It ended up being a brutal read that I could not tear my eyes from.“Don’t just fight the darkness. Bring the light.”
————
Or, as Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”
“They said the war would turn us into light.”
Regardless of what you think of war, the search for justice and desire for vengeance and setting things right are powerful forces. Maybe you can’t help but see that in order to restore peace you need to break it first. Maybe you just need to be a hero, a paladin, a bringer of light, a sword (or a rifle) to fix up the fucked-up world when everything is terribly, bleakly *wrong*. When you are told that evil others destroyed not just your family but millions of innocent helpless others, you enlist. And you think you are doing what you must do, right?
But what if nothing is what it seems?“I didn’t think about what would happen after I signed up. Or who I would need to become. I thought the world was simple: good guys and bad guys, citizens and ghouls, corporate patriots and socialist slaves.
You were with us or against us.
Pick your side.”
The future is, as it is becoming customary in SF extrapolating from current trends, heavily and bleakly corporatized. You are either are a corporate “ghoul”, a nothing and nobody destined to scrounge for scraps in the gutter, or break your back trying to earn residency or citizenship in one of the Big Six mega-corps that can deign to bestow a semblance of rights to you, a crumb or two from the corporate table. Brutal, yes - but who else can fight those ‘alien Martian terrorist socialists’ if not our good free corporations, right? Right?“You give a human being freedom and personhood as some innate right, and what do they have to fight for? Personhood is earned. Residency is earned. Citizenship is earned. If you’re not earning for the company, you are costing it.”
This book is from the start a sharp uncompromising critique of rampant capitalism run wild. The world is led by larger and larger corporations, the Big Six that become the Big Four and on, with CEOs at the helm and corporate profits being the religion. There are no countries, no governments, no accountability - just what’s handed down by the corps. It’s a throwback to feudalism, but corporatized.
“The corps take care of you, as long as you give them everything.”“The corps were rich enough to provide for everyone. They chose not to, because the existence of places like the labor camps outside São Paulo ensured there was a life worse than the one they offered. If you gave people mashed protein cakes when their only other option was to eat horseshit, they would call you a hero and happily eat your tasteless mash. They would throw down their lives for you. Give up their souls.”
And once you rule every aspect of the employees lives, you are controlling the entire narrative of their reality. So what’s stopping the lies from shaping reality? And really, from out current vantage point it’s not too much of a stretch to see how we can get there.“There was a time when human beings believed they were their governments. They understood they had power over them, because they created them. They did not simply wait around for their governments to give them rights and freedoms. They demanded them. People should not be afraid of the corporations. Corporations should be afraid of the people.”
Dietz, a former “ghoul” whose father was “disappeared” by her corporation, nevertheless joins the Earth-Mars war on the side of that corporation, driven by the need to avenge the millions that those evil Martians have wiped out in the Blink, the disappearance of her home city and her family. She buys the party line that the corporation sells - after all, abhorrent as the corporations are, they still are supposed to be the good guys in this bleak endless war - the war where Earth has a slight advantage of being able to literally break the soldiers into light and beam them at the speed of that light to where the battles are. And any war needs soldiers. And so Dietz enlists, answering the call to arms, fueled by righteous anger and desire to be on the good side - the determination that lets her survive the dehumanizing and brutal boot camp and prepare her for her new role as a grunt in the war. Because some horrors can only be answered with violence. Right? Right?“Let me tell you how they break you.
You are shit. Everything you do is shit. From the minute you step off the transport at the training base in Mendoza, you aren’t doing anything right. You don’t walk right. Look right. Talk right. You are a bag of human excrement. No one likes you, let alone loves you. In great shape? It’s not enough. Smart? That’s worse. Nothing is ever good enough for the Corporate Corps. They want blind obedience.
After a week of that, you’re hungry for anything. Hungry for a “That’s right,” or a “Good job.” You want love, acceptance. Humans want connection. I thought that was bullshit until mandatory training. I didn’t believe we were all bags of meat propelled by emotion, but I was wrong. The DIs know. They know exactly what we are, and how to play us.
That’s how they teach you to kill.”
Things go wrong for Dietz pretty quickly - right on her first military “drop”. Dietz, like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, basically gets unstuck in time. On the very first drop and thereafter, it’s the same - surfacing in the wrong place, wrong squad, wrong time - but only in the war, the neverending massacre, with no end in sight. And it’s not easy. There are rumors of the Light Brigade - those like Dietz who experience this war out of order, but if you want to survive and not be disappeared, you gotta keep your mouth shut and “stick to the brief”.“You think you can change what happens, if you know what I know? Let me tell you something. Everything that’s going to happen has already happened. You just haven’t experienced it yet. We are, all of us, caught within a massive loop of time, bouncing around in the spaces between things.”
It gets confusing and overwhelming and frustrating as hell. Dark and gritty and gruesome and extremely compelling. And visceral. Like a punch into - or, in Hurley’s writing style, through - the guts.“What I learned, as I looked back on those times, was that the lies are what sustained us. The lies kept us going. Gave us hope. Without lies we have to face the truth long before we are ready for it.
Long before we are prepared to fight it.”
And, thanks to experiencing the war out of order, Dietz realizes that everyone has been living a lie. Nothing is what it was supposed to be. There is just a struggle for control, the corporation greed, and an endless war to utter destruction without a future. There are a select few who benefit from the labor of the millions and billions working themselves to death for crumbs from the rich ones tables while deluding themselves that they are free - free to choose mindless toil, free to break their backs, free to die - for enrichment of those at the top of the corporate ladder.“Believing lies just makes everything ... easier, when those lies prop up your worldview.”
“Who were we really fighting?
They don’t like us to ask questions. They try to train it out of you, not just if you’re a corporate soldier, but for citizens and residents, too. The corp knows best, right?”
“People would believe whatever you put in front of them, if it fit their understanding of the world.”
And eventually questions must be asked and answered. Why do you fight? Who are you fighting for? Who are you even fighting? And most importantly, how can the fighting end?“That’s the war I knew. The events as I understood them. That’s how I decided which side of the war to be on. And I was. On the right side, I mean.
Nobody ever thinks they chose the wrong side.
We all think we’re made of light.”
And it all becomes a mindfuck. A brutal, cruel, political, angry, unsubtle and yet very relatable mindfuck. With no area for the gray zones. Intensely political, with not even a suggestion - praise all the higher powers - of the aggression “porn” that one could expect from military SF. With no confusion about how dangerous it is to “stick to the brief”. Maybe a bit simplistic, yes, but that may be exactly what makes it so brutally effective at beaming its message through.“This is something we don’t talk about . . . what happens when you are presented with a truth that contradicts everything you believe in?”
“But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs.”
In this book of brutality and destruction and politics and disjointed time-travel narration there is nevertheless a shining humane thread - the relationships that Dietz manages to form through her confusing disjointed years in the senseless meatgrinder of neverending war. Friends and comrades, some of whom (because of disjointed time jumps in her life) she sees violently die before she eventually meets them somewhere else in the timeline, forging the bonds that she knows will be severed soon - but that doesn’t make them less real or less poignant. The camaraderie, the cohesive glue of the weight of shared horrors, the surrogate chosen family they become for their squadmates keep the semblance of sanity as all the illusions are shattered and hopes come crashing down. The interpersonal connections are the heart of the book and the shining beacons of light in this hellish nightmare of the war.
It’s a strongly written book. It’s clever and consistent, and despite the grim nature, very engrossing. I’m frequently wary of war/battle scenes in books as they are frequently either dull or hard to follow, but here the action is done well, not detracting from the story but organically weaving it into the development of characters and settings.
And despite the dark grim brutality, this book hinges on hope. Hope that the loop of violence can be broken. Hope that the mindless corporate greed can be overcome. Hope that when a new war rally call inevitably comes, it will not be answered.
And this hope deserves its 4+ stars from this committed pacifist over here.“This is not the end. There are other worlds. Other stars. Other futures. Maybe we’ll do better out there. Maybe when they have a war again, no one will come.
Maybe they will be full of light.”
———————
My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... -
4.5 stars
Dietz’s family were destroyed in the Blink, wiped out in an instant. Nobody thought anything like that could happen, nobody knew tech like that existed. But the proof is in the absence of millions of souls, a whole city disappeared. All that’s left now is revenge, so Dietz signs up for the corporate military, the best way to take the fight to those responsible: Mars. The corps have got their own revolutionary tech, a way of moving armies across space. Yet things don’t go quite as planned. Being broken down into particles of light and beamed off-planet, propelled from one hot zone to another, watching comrades die from drops gone bad even before the fighting starts….all this is grim enough, but Dietz is experiencing it all wrong. Out of sync with fellow grunts and increasingly uncertain about what or when’s real, Dietz is starting to attract the wrong kind of attention. The answer: stick to the mission brief. Say nothing. But what if the only way out of this unending war is lost somewhere in the welter of bloody, confusing images?? What if the truth is something only Dietz can discover?
This is a world controlled by corporations, giant multi-national companies which have supplanted governments but perpetuate the very worst of their combined aspects. Now they're fighting their own wars, against each other as much as the apparent Martian threat. If it seems more like a what if, than a when…well, take a better look around. People are little more than cogs in the machine, their only worth seen through the lens of their potential use to the corporations. Choice is a freedom open only to citizens and even then it’s mostly illusion. The corps are the purest example, supplied by an endless stream of people with few options. The promise of a slightly better life for themselves and their family offered as a meagre carrot to balance the very big stick of sickness, starvation, death. There’s no holding back on the processes of indoctrination and control, a ruthless system with one aim, and it becomes increasingly clear that it’s not the one they signed up for. Soldiers are brutalised, de-humanised, trained to kill without hesitation and more importantly, without question.
‘You want to gouge the eyes of a stranger? You tried it? How did that go? Hardly anybody does that shit. If they do, it’s in a fit of rage or madness. But cold, calculated killing? Only one percent of people are psychopaths. The rest of us have to learn.’
It’s not hard to work out why a military-industrial-ruling corporation might want that as a foundation for their soldiers, but it becomes ever more important when people start coming back from drops knowing more than they should. The so-called Light Brigade are disappearing at an alarming rate, but Dietz is something special, and the corp brass want to know what Dietz knows. After all, it might offer some kind of advantage in the war. And that means more power, more influence, more money. Financial gain as the bottom line means anything goes, anything and anyone. Life really is cheap here (just here??). There’s certainly no leaving this with any misapprehensions about the dichotomy between powerful/powerless, part of a thoroughly cutting commentary on contemporary society as much as this future Earth. From the blasted wastelands created by climate change to pervasive surveillance tech, from limited social, political, and economic rights for certain groups to the criminal immorality of unconstrained corporate greed, this is a book for our time. It might be a high-action, high-concept sci fi military thriller, but it’s also a dare to think.
Time travel storylines can be problematic in many ways, especially if they’re hard to follow, but the primary issue for me is that they tend to work against emotional connections, both within the text and between reader and characters. What’s so powerful about this book is that the author used the fluid timeline to build deep and sincere feeling into Dietz’s experiences: the desperate grasping for some kind of mental foundation stone, for stability and understanding, the quiet anguish of interactions with friends whose violent deaths Dietz has already seen and experienced, the remorseless shattering of any illusions about the validity of the war and of the reasons for signing up. It was incredibly effective, but just one part of what makes this such a creative and intelligent offering. The methodological planning of the timelines, the attention to every detail, the sheer cleverness in the way it was all put together… it’s genuinely thrilling and more than a little impressive. Yet not once does the author lose sight of the flesh and blood aspect, the understanding that however important it is to be crafty with the book’s execution, it’s more essential to be authentically human. When the notion of time and reality becomes slippery, the veracity of the characters is what holds it together. Dietz offers a striking example of internal conflict, an emotional and dynamic search for moral action which takes the character outside the categories of hero/villain. Even with all that, the stylistic choice that struck me the most was the lack of anything to identify the main character’s gender until right at the end. Or so it seemed to me. Dietz is Dietz… and that is all. Even in the book’s blurb, nothing is specified. And I love that it makes no difference either way, not to being a soldier in a brutal war, or to being someone who just might be able to change the future.
Cleverly crafted, with social commentary sharp enough to cause a fatal bleed, and seriously fun to boot?? Yeah, this is a real good time. An excellent addition to the genre and well worth adding to your TBR.
ARC via Netgalley -
Final review, first posted on
Fantasy Literature:
“War is hell,” William Tecumseh Sherman famously said in the aftermath of the American Civil War, and Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, a Hugo and Locus award nominated novel, drives that point home. The brutality of a soldier’s life combines with dystopia and hellish corporate behavior, but it’s lightened by the gritty determination of the main character, Dietz, and a handful of others to find the right path out of the nightmarish war, and by a hopefulness that refuses to be beaten down.
In a near-future day, six huge corporations, called the Big Six, control most of Earth’s society, doling out vital services only to people who are citizens. Dietz, a non-citizen of São Paulo, has suffered the loss of family and friends in “The Blink,” a mysterious event that instantly destroyed São Paulo and killed over two million people. Martian colonists, considered “aliens” by Earth, are blamed for the Blink, and Dietz promptly joins the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps to avenge the deaths and to try to be a hero, a personage of light. Which Dietz becomes, but not in the way envisioned.
Earth has one major advantage over Mars in this war: scientists have figured out how to break down the soldiers into atoms and transporting them, like a beam of light, to various battle locations, even across space. This teleporting technology doesn’t always work out well for the soldiers, but nobody asks the privates for their opinions. The corporation considers that it owns the soldiers, body and soul, and has the ability to order them to do anything and everything. But the war isn’t what the brass in power have made it out to be, and Dietz begins experiencing the war in a non-linear fashion. Each teleporting jump lands Dietz in a different time and place, though generally with the same platoon.
The Light Brigade is a military science fiction novel that follows the time-honored path, first popularized in Robert Heinlein’s
Starship Troopers, of following an eager but naïve recruit into the military machine, through basic training and into battle, gaining experience, seniority and skepticism along the way. Dietz’s Brazilian origins and yearning for the benefits of citizenship, among other things, make it clear that The Light Brigade is in conversation with Starship Troopers (there are a number of these deliberate homages and references to various MilSF novels). But Hurley’s novel is far more spiritually akin to Joe Haldeman’s
The Forever War, which speaks to the dehumanizing effect of war and the alienation experienced by soldiers.
The Light Brigade takes the discussion in a somewhat different and more modern direction. It’s more viscerally and overtly brutal and bloody and profane, punching home the point that war, in addition to being hell on earth, is more often than not unjustified by the circumstances. Dietz narrates almost the entire book, other than some occasionally transcripts of interviews with a prisoner of war, the purpose and import of which become clear much later in the novel. It’s interesting that we don’t find out Dietz’s sex for a long time, or first name for even longer. Soldiering and war are equal-opportunity, and equally brutal for both sexes. Dietz is truly just a cog in the warfare machinery … until Dietz isn’t.
There’s a lot of jumping around in time and place and the plot can get a little hard to follow as a result. In the acknowledgements at the end, Hurley mentions her debt to the person who helped create a mathematical graph to track all of the events in the book and ensure that they line up correctly, so I’m certain that the events and timeline(s) would make far more sense on a second read. The Light Brigade is a bit simplistic with its villains, contrasting the profoundly uncaring and frequently even evil corporations and their leadership with the hopeful and hope-bringing socialists. The world-building is also a little sparse, as are the characterizations of the soldiers other than Dietz. With just a couple of exceptions, I tended to lose track of who was who.
But Hurley’s handling of the events and themes is powerful. There’s optimism and hope in the face of despair, corrupt corporations and governments, abuse of authority and a blasted world. The teleporting and time travel aspects add to the intrigue of the plot.
The Light Brigade is based on Hurley’s
2015 short story of the same name, published in Lightspeed magazine. I read it after reading the novel, and it’s rather like reading the CliffNotes for the novel (so, spoilers ahoy). I don’t always prefer novelizations of shorter works; for example, I think the original short versions of Daniel Keyes’ “
Flowers for Algernon,” Isaac Asimov’s
Nightfall and Nancy Kress’s
Beggars in Spain were all more potent than the subsequent novels. But in the case of The Light Brigade, I’d definitely recommend the novel, as long as the reader has the stomach for unpleasant wartime events.
Content notes: Pretty hard R rating for gory and brutal battle scenes and lots of F-bombs. Dietz has sex (all non-explicit) with multiple people of both sexes (at least one of whom was married). -
Initially I was going to rate this a 3, but as I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't actually enjoyed the book much.
There are a lot of books that this book reminds me of. Dietz, the main character, could be an homage to William Dietz the military science fiction author. The idea of ground troops obviously evokes Starship Troopers, Edge of Tomorrow, but also The Forever War, and I think the author had The Forever War more in mind. The destruction of Sao Paulo is the instigation for the war instead of Buenos Aires. I'm sure there's more that I'm not remembering. You get a lot of the tropes of a milsf novel- the deadly basic training, for example.
Soldiers are transported instantly from place to place (on Mars or on Earth) by being broken down into light and then shot to their destination. This doesn't always go smoothly. Sometimes people get re-materialized partly inside solid objects. Dietz finds that she doesn't always go to the same place/time that the rest of her platoon. She goes forward in time, then later on in her own future experiences the past jump that everyone else remembers. This was the most interesting part of the book for me. How does the time loop work? What's causality worth when time travel comes into play? How can Dietz use this to her advantage?
The answer is that for most of the book she doesn't. (spoiler here, Dietz is not designated as any particular gender for most of the book but a couple of clues told me she was likely female, and she is.) Dietz just staggers along reacting, not figuring out how any of this works, a hapless victim batted back and forth across time.
This was one of the things that annoyed me about the book: the dialogue. The soldiers are given lenses that record them- all the time. It's ostensibly for mission supervision and review; it's really to give the soldiers no space to discuss any kind of rebellion. Because of this, the dialogue is a lot of fits, starts, and oblique insinuations. I don't know how much of it was on purpose to avoid attention from on high and how much of it was because this was an inarticulate bunch. There are times right after the drops that coms are down, but Dietz doesn't succeed in using this unmonitored time productively. There's lots of "But...", "What's...", and "Stick to the brief!"
"Stick to the brief!" is what soldiers say to remind each other to follow the mission brief. Dietz gets told this a LOT when she tries to figure out when she is and what is happening. Eventually, she just sort of accepts that and goes along with whatever mission is in front of her. So there isn't much dialogue that's meaningful, explanatory, or that furthers character. Most other characters aren't drawn in more than a few strokes, and the main impression I got from Dietz was that she wasn't too bright, wanted to be a hero, and had a knack for pissing people off.
There's also a lot of emphasis on torture. There are immersive modules designed to train soldier to resist torture. A few people figure out how to beat the modules- basically by keeping in mind that they are in a simulation and can control their response to these stimuli instead of reacting to them. I think that Dietz uses this concept to eventually figure out how to direct herself in space and time, but this isn't linked clearly. There's also a series of interrogation records that to me, went nowhere. Dietz is talking to an unknown interrogator/torturer but I didn't think many concepts were explored in these sequences that weren't explored elsewhere in the book.
This book kind of felt like a mess. Characters who couldn't or wouldn't communicate, records of an interrogation sprinkled throughout the rest of the book that were nothing but vague foreshadowing, a main character who also couldn't figure out what was going on, and an author who didn't signpost what was going on clearly enough for me to follow it well. Dietz gets some hint of things not being as they appear on missions but she's such a corporate drone (corporations have replaced governments on earth) that she didn't take these hints very seriously and so neither did I.
At the end, things happened fast. Dietz suddenly gains near godlike control over her abilities. And we circle around to the beginning again. Hurley has a pretty bleak vision of a future corporate dystopia that doesn't feel entirely unlikely. Maybe I need to read this book again to see if it flows better once I have a better idea of what's really going on, but frankly I don't want to. And that's the problem- this book may be an interesting puzzle, but I didn't find it to be an enjoyable one. I was frustated with Dietz and the book's world was one that I didn't enjoy spending time in. -
This book pissed me off. The first 19% is so miserable you think there's gotta be a change coming. And then around 20% you think you've found it. And then the next 60% the narrator, and thus you, are still finding THE SAME F***ING THING YOU FOUND 60% AGO and then it tries to throw in a twist, gives up, and dies.
Thank the powers that be for sweet release.
CONTENT WARNINGS:
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what is so good about this story. It's got the "everyone's bi/pan, of color and women are in positions of power" uh...nod(?) at representation(?) I guess? It's orgasmically violent, if that's your bag? It...really hates capitalism? Which is, you know, I think generally approved?
I'm grasping at straws.
It's incredibly poorly written--it reads like a first draft. To really drive home the drama, there are lots of sentences set off from the rest of the paragraph for emphasis.
Like this.
Sometimes several times in a row.
Which sort of fucks with the cadence.
Also it repeats itself.
Sometimes several times in a row.
The narrator is an absolute shit maggot of a person. Just a waste of space and ink, seriously. Everyone is just awful to each other until the sex happens. And SO DUMB. My God, I sort of hope this was all a simulation because the narrator was so fatally thick I think they would have died choking on their own spit before they got to finish a thought.
The premise made no sense.
The war was obviously meant to make a point that we then made a dozen more times, and were meant to revel in the depth of this sophomoric idea each time the author blessed us with a recap.
The "twist" made no sense.
The end was obvious to the point of ridiculousness.
In short, if you aren't angry and would like to be, I recommend this book. Otherwise, go do something more enjoyable, like a deep clean of that one drawer that accumulates junk no matter how hard you try.
HILARIOUSLY, while this is a dig(?) at capitalism, it's such an obvious money grab that I sort of feel dirty participating in it. War is hell, soldiers. Suck off the teat of the corp until they kill you. At least then it ends. -
Here's another WOW title. I've enjoyed Kameron Hurley's other novels quite a lot but nothing prepared me for this one.
It's the spiritual grandson (or grandaughter) of Haldeman's
The Forever War and Heinlein's
Starship Troopers. It has a little of both and a lot of the very modern tone, updated to our very real cultural relativity wrapped up in a very hardcore DUTY wrapping while never quite knowing what is really real. In that respect, it's a bit of PKD, too.
And I love it.
Getting turned into light to fight on Mars in a neverending war is the signature of futility in a fantastic hard-SF bow.
For those of you who are big fans of Hurley's other hard-SF trilogy, it deals with the same issues of torture, being ground down to nothing, and working through the lies, lies, lies surrounding them.
The big bad is never all that clear. We're told it's Mars but while everyone is kept in the dark and strange time-hopping things happen out of sequence and big horrors keep turning their lives into a patchwork, we're given a very special look at the real enemy. Could it be ourselves? :)
Back into the meat grinder, men!
Just... wow. I think Hurley's writing is getting even better. I'm such a fan of this novel that I want to see it get nommed for Hugo.
That's three for this year so far! Really great SF, folks. :) -
Starship Troopers meets Edge of Tomorrow. A grim and gritty future where wars are fought between corporations and the rest of us are ground in the machinery, but there's room for hope, and heroes, and a call for us all to be the light in dark times. The juggling of timelines here is incredibly impressive. Hurley makes what must have been a beast of a book to write look easy, and never boring. The pacing perfect and the revelation of secrets upon secrets satisfying. Hurley is at the top of her game. Highly recommend.
-
I feel like I'm back to a Too Like the Lightning situation: this book is just as unreadable as it is clever. But finished it, and I have feelings, so it must mean something. How do I even rate something like this?
The way I rated Too Like the Lightning, I guess. Four stars it is.
My first reaction, when I finished this, was "I want to lie down somewhere and look at the stars". Which, one could think, is an odd thing to take away from one of the bleakest, most depressing books I have ever read - something I actively hated reading.
But the ending was... I don't know if I can even describe what worked exactly about the ending. It's something you have to experience for yourself.
And I think that it takes skill to write a book as bleak as The Light Brigade that still manages to make the reader feel something in the end that isn't completely negative. Most SFF books about the horrors of war don't do that (and I dislike them for it. I don't know, I'm stressed and sad enough as is, and if I want more, I have real stories to draw from).
But I think it's also fair to say that a book isn't only its ending, and someone might want to know if reading 300+ pages of pure ugly is worth those last few chapters. For me.... it was, mostly.
There was nothing to keep me reading this book. Nothing apart from the fact that Kameron Hurley wrote one of my favorite books - and, to quote The Light Brigade, this probably also had an influence:[...] there’s this thing called escalation of commitment. That once people have invested a certain amount of time in a project, they won’t quit, even if it’s no longer a good deal.
Anyway. I'm glad it worked in my favor, I'm glad this isn't the first book I've read by Kameron Hurley, and I'm glad this made me trust her enough to finish The Light Brigade.
This is a novel set in a future in which corporations own everything, from infrastructures to healthcare to the people themselves and their access to information. And they're in a war with the humans who settled on Mars, because the Martians are evil. Supposedly.
The worldbuilding here was... solid, for the most part. I had no idea how anything or anyone looked like, but if you look for novels in which the worldbuilding is focused on the themes and low on the details, The Light Brigade is exactly that. So much that one might even criticize it for lack of subtlety in its discussions on the role of war, the meaning of freedom and heroism, and its criticism of capitalism, but sometimes that's necessary. Not because readers won't get it, but because there was no way the main character wouldn't react strongly in situations like these.
All of Kameron Hurley's books end up doing interesting things with gender. God's War had a woman in a stereotypically male role, The Stars Are Legion had an all-lesbian cast, and The Light Brigade has a main character who narrates the book in first person whose gender isn't explicitly stated until the ending. Which makes sense, because why would it matter, in a book about a sci-fi war? But Dietz is also explicitly bi/pan, and while that doesn't "matter" either - Dietz just is attracted to people of different genders - I really appreciated it.
Also, I think Dietz is afrolatinx too (lives in São Paulo and is of Ivorian descent).
The Light Brigade is also a very confusing read. It's a story about a character who starts experiencing time jumps because of an unusual reaction to sci-fi technology. Which means that Dietz doesn't experience time the way other characters do, and this story is very difficult to follow - there are still some details that are lost on me - but the way it adds distance between the tragedies and the main character oddly made it easier to read? It also meant that there was a lot of distance between the main character and all the side characters, and if you're the kind of person who reads books for the interactions between characters, this is something to keep in mind. But I didn't have a problem with the "all the side characters kind of blur together" thing, as I imagine that's how it would feel to be around so many people who die.
I (mostly) hated reading this, and continued just because writing and pacing were great and because I trusted the author, but it also made me think about a lot of things, which I guess was the point. I don't want to penalize a book for what it meant to do. Also, if a book has so many things I don't like reading about in it - dystopian worlds, time travel, a lot of meaningless-feeling death - and still works for me?
It means it's really good. -
Last year I read Hurley's short story collection,
Meet Me in the Future: Stories, which has a short story with the same name. That's the story that grew into this novel. Interestingly last year, I also read Carlo Rovelli's
The Order of Time, and some of his ideas based in theoretical physics undergird the plot, timeline, and travel abilities in this novel (the author gives more details in
her blog. Dietz, the main character, starts the novel covered in blood with few memories of what happened, and the story unfolds through more missions and interrogations. I found myself enjoying the philosophical discussions of corporations, autonomy, truth, and more, but some was a bit too close to our current situation for comfort.
Some bits to share:
"We urge anyone with flu-like symptoms to report to the nearest corporate wellness center. We are working diligently on a vaccine and expect it to be in trials very soon..." (pg 190 in my edition)
"The lies kept us going. Gave us hope. Without lies we have to face the truth long before we are ready for it. Long before we are prepared to fight it." (198)
"Sometimes, to save the world, you have to let it break." (262)
"Our lives are finite. Our bodies imperfect. We shouldn't spend it feeding somebody else's cause." (325) -
4.0 Stars
This is such a smart, twisty military sci-fi thriller. This is a gritty story that explores the brutality of war. This is not a subgenre I typically love but this one is so well plotted that I am completely impressed.
I strongly recommend going into this book as blindly as possible and experiencing the narrative for yourself the first time. It's the kind of book that demands rereading and I think I will love it even more now that I know the big picture.
I love how creative Kameron Hurley is an author. They are definitely on the way to becoming a new favourite author. I strongly recommend this science fiction novel, even if you don't read a lot of military fiction. -
Political military sci-fi. Didn't really work for me - I found it too dark and hopeless and overly political.
Military part drums in the brutality and pointlessness of war via throwing the mc in exceedingly horrible situations. I lost the count how many times she returns from battlefield covered in blood and bits of her former friends and lovers. Slaughtering civilians, kids with blown of limbs, following the orders even when they know full well it's the wrong thing to do etc. Hopeless circle of brutality and horror.
I enjoyed the political part at first. There are some good ideas about the flaws of political system, power of corporations, non-existent freedoms of lower classes, controlled media and brainwashed population. Unfortunately it becomes somewhat repetitive and preachy towards the second part of the book.
All in all after wading through all that blood and horror I felt rather disappointed for not finding any new ideas. In my opinion Old Man's War and Takeshi Kovacs series relayed most of the same ideas with more grace and humour.
For a book with the "Light" in the name - it is remarkably lacking any light. -
Light Brigade was in my priority reading list for a while. I am finally done with it, and I am extremely glad I read it. This book speaks of many things while fighting for a cause in space. It was a real thought provoking and mind blowing science fiction written in a long while. A must read.
-
I've been thinking about this one for a week, wondering what to write as a review. It's complex, rewards a familiarity with the field as well as a careful reading of the text, but everything moves at a breakneck pace.
Dietz is a recently joined up soldier in the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps in an effort to gain citizenship. Dietz's origin was as a "ghoul", a non-citizen resident of São Paulo. In the corporate-controlled post climate wars society, if you're not a citizen then you have no human rights at all. There's also that São Paulo was the site of the "Blink" a mass teleportation terrorist attack that's blamed on Martian ex-colonists.
The Corporate Corps themselves use a teleportation technology to transfer their troops around by translating them into light, which some soldiers have strange reactions to. They don't necessarily wind up where and when they should. Dietz is one of those and what is actually going on unfolds as Dietz gets a much broader view of the conflict than anyone expects.
If you're familiar with the book and movie versions of
Starship Troopers, the beginning of this book has a lot of references that tie in with those signalling the conversation that the author wishes to have. Which is about society and government and the responsibility of people involved in them, mostly from a leftist perspective. This is a world where corporations are an unambiguous evil and, unlike ours, without even the thin veneer of government to restrain their interests. There are also other references sprinkled through the text, notably very slightly misspelled references to other female authors and their works in this space. I only picked a few, but it's part of the fun to spot them so I won't spoil that here.
The other really interesting point in the plot is how the author plays with the timeline here, making the book feel a bit like the movies Edge of Tomorrow, 12 Monkeys or Donnie Darko. It's a challenge to piece together where it all fits in and in what order.
Probably my favorite from this author to date, and ends up being easily as weird as some of her other works. -
I love a good time-travel mind-twister. This would make an excellent movie, if
Edge Of Tomorrow didn't already exist. Is there more money to be made out of this type of time-bending military sci-fi? I hope so!
When Dietz's whole family is wiped out in an attack on Sao Paulo by Martian colonists, she enlists to avenge her people. The world is now ran by several powerful corporations instead of governments, and Dietz works for one of them. New technology allows soldiers to be momentarily transported from one place to another (or a planet) at the speed of light. They are basically pulled apart down to particles, and then put back together. For some reason, Dietz gets reassembled into a wrong, random time line after each "drop", thus experiencing the war in a non-linear way.
The Light Brigade is essentially a novel about the brutality of war and corporate greed. Remove the time travel, and you've witnessed every point made in this book in real life, in real time. I prefer my books a tad deeper and heftier in worldbuilding, but this high-octane thriller is compulsively readable. I will give it another read to re-experience the intricacies of the time loop (the BEST part of every time-travel tale) for sure.
I expect this work will make a splash in SF world this year. -
This is a military SF with heavy allusions to a lot of classics, from
Starship Troopers to
The Forever Warto
Kim Stanley Robinson‘s Mars Trilogy. I highly praise all mentioned books and for me this one wasn’t at the level with them.
The story follows Dietz, a ghoul (unregistered person, lowest of the low in this corporate dystopia future), who wants to rise up in the social status and to avenge the family, which was annihilated (?) during Martian attack on Earth. Martians are actually human colonists on Mars, who setup some kind of a socialist/communist utopia KSR (
Kim Stanley Robinson) style while on Earth nations and businesses fought each other until only six corps remained, which carved up the world. Some Martians returned to restore irradiated and poisoned lands, but are deeply mistrusted.
Dietz signs up with a corporate military and after some painful training (think not as much of
Starship Troopers but Full Metal Jacket), they are sent into action. Here the title of the book plays out: there is a mechanism to disassemble bodies to send them as light to assemble at the end-point. However, something goes wrong with Dietz, for (it seems) there is not only space but time travel. There follows the highly non-linear story, told by possibly unhinged narrator.
What I disliked is the vitriolic hate against corporations from the start: they are eeeevil, they indoctrinate people, present them with false choices, absolutely immoral and myopic. While there is a long tradition of corps in SF, especially after cyberpunk, which in turn were largely affected by contemporary success of Japanese Keiretsu, which are bad, a theme is a bit cliché and so far I see more threat of the authoritarian regimes like China than of corps like Facebook in terms of surveillance and ultimate control. This in no way means that corps are valiant knights of prosperity – power corrupts, be it over citizens or over consumers and there is quite a list of examples, where bottomlines are more important than people. However, making villains for villain sake borders on ridiculous.
the fact is there is no free society on Earth. Everyone is owned by someone else. The resistance here wants to unshackle you, but that’s too frightening for most people. So what does that leave us? Free people who believe they are already free? They think they have chosen their servitude, and that makes them individuals, powerful. Freedom to work? Ha! Freedom to die on the factory floor, behind a desk, pissing in place because they don’t get bathroom breaks. Freedom to be fired at the whim of a boss bleeding you dry on stagnant wages you can only spend at the company store. But the choice of the whip or the chain is a false choice. Sometimes you have to leave people behind. They’re part of the old world. They aren’t capable of building something new. To build something new is to admit that the lives they lead aren’t what they believed. And to lose that belief . . . threatens their sense of themselves. The annihilation of beliefs is the annihilation of the self. -
My personal favourite from Hurley so far, if not her most creative considering her other work. The time travel storyline was interesting and mostly made sense up until the end, when I admit to losing track a bit.
A definite must for fans of time travel stories especially in the context of military SF. -
A challenging read. Certainly if you, like me, pick the audio for this one.
The first-person narrator Dietz has recently joined the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps, and is about to get ready to join the war against the martians. Dietz’s family vanished in the "Blink", a terrorist attack on Sao Paulo, supposedly by former martian colonists. So this is personal for her.
As Dietz and her fellow young grunts go through basic training I was frequently reminded of "Starship Troopers". And it’s no coincidence, as the author takes several nods to different books and authors of the genre. Basic training is an extensive part of this book and there already it becomes clear that Hurley is serious about showing that war is indeed hell. The book is brutal.
Earth, which is now divided between six corporations, has worked out how to break their soldiers down into atoms and transport them over large distances, and across space, as a beam of light, and then have them being put together at the battle front, which doesn’t always end well. But apart from being under heavy fire before your body is fully put back together, or turning up in places which are already occupied by let’s say the walls of a building (ouch) there are also other problems. Soon Dietz is experiencing dissonances between the mission briefs and the actual circumstances in which she shows up. She’s experiencing the war out of order.
This is where the story gets interesting, and often times hard to follow. Dietz is as disoriented as was I, as we were both trying to piece together how all the events she experiences fit into the grand scheme of things, and in which order. And having a look into the future soon raises some other questions, like whom are we actually fighting, what are we fighting for, and for whom. The narration is also frequently interspersed by the interrogation of an older Dietz, that clearly already knows the answers to those questions, or at least believes she does. Those parts were done extremely well. Even if they initially add to the reader’s confusion.
It’s a good and clever book, that wasn’t always fun. Which I mainly put down to the format I chose. The narration is fine, the interviews being particularly good, but I’m not the most attentive listener of audiobooks. And this book certainly would benefit from being able to go back a few chapters here and there to look something up. And that’s not much fun if you’re using the audio version. I’m also a little tired of the bad guys in this one, and the time until Dietz finally was able to understand what’s going on and how to take control of it was too long for me and made the ending feel a little rushed. It also wasn’t clear enough for me how exactly Dietz managed to break out of it in the end. I listened to the last two hours again and think that Hurley could have done a better job with that.
3.5 stars, rounded down.
Hugo 2020 nominee for Best Novel.
____________________________
2020 Hugo Award Finalists
Best Novel
•
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
•
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
•
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
•
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
•
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire
•
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
Best Novella
• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang (
Exhalation)
•
The Deep by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
•
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
•
In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire
•
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
•
To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
Best Novelette
• The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim (
Lightspeed Magazine, April 2019)
• Away With the Wolves by Sarah Gailey (
Uncanny Magazine Issue 30: Disabled People Destroy Fanatsy! Special Issue)
• The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker (
Uncanny Magazine Issue 29: July/August 2019)
•
Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin
•
For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll
•
Omphalos by Ted Chiang
Best Short Story
• And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (
Strange Horizons 9 September 2019)
•
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang
•
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon
• A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (
Uncanny Magazine, Issue 26, January-February 2019)
• Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (
Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #270)
• Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 80)
Best Series
• The Expanse by
James S. A. Corey
• InCryptid by
Seanan McGuire
• Luna by
Ian McDonald
• Planetfall series by
Emma Newman
• Winternight Trilogy by
Katherine Arden
• The Wormwood Trilogy by
Tade Thompson
Best Related Work
•
Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
•
Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones
•
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara
•
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn
• 2019 John W. Campbell Award Acceptance Speech by Jeannette Ng
• Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, produced and directed by Arwen Curry
Best Graphic Story or Comic
•
Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, letters by Clayton Cowles
•
LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford, colours by James Devlin
•
Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
•
Mooncakes by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker, letters by Joamette Gil
•
Paper Girls, Volume 6, written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher
•
The Wicked + The Divine, Volume 9: "Okay" by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles -
Two and half stars.
This story has been told a lot of times. Usually there are two aspects in war stories. “The good war”, that is, just for the fun (fun for the reader of course); and the pacifist story that is the case of The Light Brigade. I love both types but in this case, simply this book is not for me.
So there is a future war, but apart for the means of transport, basically there are no future weapons and no future improvements to kill people (okay, I really should not complain about that).
About the military stuff, the story starts by the main character enlistment and the brutality of the training; and then to the war itself, but as I said before we have seen it in a lot of movies, particularly in the vietnamesque ones, and it is difficult to tell something really innovative here.
The other aspect of the novel is about an ultra-capitalist dystopian future. Well, we also know the criticisms about the excesses of capitalism today but curiously this part is a bit more entertaining that the war stuff.
The story is explained in the first person by the main character, the soldier Dietz. If you do that in a novel be aware that your main character has no inconsistencies, and Dietz has some... disorders (and she has some psychological disorders too). I mean that her narrative is not entirely coherent, even taking into account her evolution throughout the story. However, I understand that it is very difficult to do it in a complex plot like this one.
I admit that in half the reading I was totally disinterested of the story. I considered giving up but I think the book does not deserve this; it is not bad written, of course not. So I decided to read more and expect that the ending was better. And it was, I must say that at least the ending improves a bit the story and justifies -partially- this mess.
But the reading is hard. For example the constant "Marine style" chatter (F*ck this!, F*ck that!, f*ck everyone and everything!), or the repetitive mention of the soldier names from every platoon is both tiresome and confusing: Dietz!, Saldana!, Landon!, Prakash!, Ortega!, Tanaka!, Jones!, KOWALSKI! and a lot more. About the last one you must visit TV Tropes and read the post "Why so many Kowalski-s? (LOL). In any case, my advice is not to read the book after dinner.
Also there is the abuse of lapidary phrases and rhetorical questions: “Because they were going to lose the war. Everyone loses in war.” or “The brass was full of ideas. Aren’t they always?”. If the author wants the reader to be depressed of war she is successful but not in the way she intends to do.
So, despite the good reviews of The Light Brigade I can not blame myself if I find it boring. I understand that the plot development proposed by the author is very difficult to achieve; but it was not me, it was the book! I also think that with a third less pages the story would work better. -
Bleak, Gory, and my dad would call it subversive. Kameron Hurley also manage to capture a little revolutionary optimism among passages of soldiers being blown apart and corporations fighting consolidation wars. the Light Brigade is a good mixture of the non-stop Action in starship trooper and the ideology concepts of Forever War.
set 1000 years into the future where all nations have turned into 7 all powerful corporations a war breaks out between the corps and Human colonist on mars. Dietz our hero/Villain or PTSD bystander you can decide at the end. joins the war after everyone she loves is seemingly destroyed by the Martians in an attack of her hometown of Sao Paulo Tennislyvia Corp territory. what follows is a very interesting story involving time distillations after the mandatorily awful boot camp. I am so impressed with Hurley she managed to write a complex timeline including college level physics that a Butcher from Georgia could follow. I like puzzles to solve as I read/listen and her timeline was fascinating as I put it together with Dietz.
https://www.kameronhurley.com/categor... here is a article by the author on the timeline but I encourage you to only check it if you get lost or after completion of the story to "fact Check" as it were. she makes Hard Sci-fi Easy by having you focus on Dietz and the carnage of war while slipping in the exploration of reality, physics, morality and philosophy. she also slips in some liberal concepts I am usually not one for political diatribes skewed to either side as a American moderate but I can appreciate it if it's done subtly which I think Hurley does. Hurley also cleverly make several important reveals through out the book most notably the gender reveal that had my Sword and Laser group buzzing. she also withheld the character first name till the very end to show the regaining of humanity that a name is associated with.
overall the reading experience was more like a intellectual Easter egg hunt with reveals and big concept sprinkling into a nonlinear timeline engulfed by a endless gory war. the ending is left somewhat vague with you being left to wonder is Dietz the hero of the human race the villain/origin of the war, or just a brain addled soldier! I could see this winning a Hugo! -
Kameron Hurley is a super-fucking-badass. And I mean that in the most respectful way possible. This book is not only tremendously fun and exciting but it also has a lot to say about community and free-will and the price(s) we pay for the people and things we love. I sincerely loved the ending and it pulled off bringing together all the craziness that came before even though at times it seemed like it would be impossible to do so. This is the fourth book I have read by Kameron and it is, for me, by far the most ambitious and entertaining one. I loved The Stars are Legion and first experienced her work through the first two books of the Worldbreaker Saga but this surpasses those in every way, and I mean like, WOW. This is seriously impressive literature and is a good way to spend time and money!
-
4.5 Stars - I was totally surprised by just how much I loved this book! This book has a quality that I absolutely love... purposeful disorientation for the reader, but a sense that the author is still in complete control. I think the thematic content was a little too on the nose & the ending was a bit too pat, but still. Very much enjoyed & would recommend
-
Motherfuck! This book was so good! 🤯🤯🤯
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Si no llega a ser porque era del Club de Lectura, no lo acabo.
Si no llega a ser porque quería ponerlo a parir con total conocimiento de causa, no lo acabo.
Si no llega ser porque quería leer dos de esta autora para estar seguro de que la va a leer más veces la madre del topo (Buscar chiste en Google), no lo acabo.
…pero he conseguido acabarlo.
¡¡VAYA MIERDA!!
Resumen no spoileado:
Las Corporaciones son muuuuuuuuuu malas.
La Guerra es muuuuuuuuuuu mala.
(Osti-á, grandes novedades).
Lo socialistas marcianos son muuuuuuuuuuuu buenos.
(no comento nada que me acusan de politizar).
..y YA!
Eso es la novela.
El resto es un constructor de episodios bélicos y episodios temporales que aburre a las ovejas y a las abejas. Que para seguirle el hilo –hilo que no me ha interesado en ningún momento- tenía tela la cosa con el baile de personajes. Que no es sino una moralina disfrazada de novela. Y cuyo final, de nuevo para la madre del topo.
Señora Kameron, que escriba usted mucho y muchos años, pero a mí no me caza de nuevo.
P.D: Todo lo anterior dicho respetuosamente respecto a la voluntad democrática de quienes le votasteis (¡So cabrones y cabronas!) Y a pesar de todo, os quiero. Seguid ahí. -
Time travel is back!
Was it ever really gone? Not for a second - time travel stories are pretty much a constant in Science Fiction. It's almost a physical law - like thermodynamics, or at least like Godwin's law - that as a steady stream of SF novels is released the likelihood of one of them being centred around time travel exponentially increases towards certainty.
And so this year we have the usual swathe of time travel novels, including the magnificent This is How You Lose the Time War and Kameron Hurley's very entertaining The Light Brigade, which is an interesting blend of military SF and time travel shenanigans.
It's hard to write a MilSF or time travel story without plundering the cliched history of this subgenre, but Hurley does a pretty good job of mixing combat and a twisty-turny time-hopping narrative.
Where things do fall down a little is in the mandatory (for MilSF) boot camp chapters. Protagonist Dietz has to endure the usual gruelling training common to MilSF novels, of the Starship Troopers model. Recruits are mistreated, have to take copious amounts of physical punishment, and die in the course of their training, as per the MilSF template.
That’s not to say this part of the book isn’t entertaining or well written – it is both of those. It is however pretty stock-standard. Dietz has joined the military to get even after the city of Sao Paulo was wiped off the map by the enemy (Like Rico in Starship Troopers), serves in an integrated male and female unit (like Rico in Starship Troopers) and lives in a world where citizenship can be gained via military service (like… you get the idea).
If this book was a custom hot rod, Hurley would have built it on the solid, dependable chassis of a 59’ Heinlein.
Beyond the boot camp segments these comparisons fade. Dietz is a member of a corporate army in a world riven by inter-company wars that is now fighting a war against a rogue Martian colony. To get to battles she and her comrades are dissolved into light, and transported vast distances before reforming into their physical forms, a dangerous process that sometimes sees them appearing minus limbs, or with their bodies all jumbled up.
As Dietz gets send on missions she begins to notice that she appears to be jumping throughout her own timeline, appearing at battles she should already have fought, and in distant times where all her former comrades are apparently dead. She puts some of this down to the dislocating nature of being turned into light, but soon begins to realize that she is genuinely jumping around in times, and slowly realizes that the war she is fighting is both a sham, and a threat to the survival of the human species.
This makes for an intriguing narrative, and Dietz is an intriguing character, whose gender is deliberately not stated until rather late in the book. I assumed the main character was male (bias, much?) and that they were bisexual (Dietz has trysts with males and females in the story), but while this trick was interesting in that it allows for introspection around reader gender bias, I felt it was a little cheap on Hurley’s part. Hiding something about a character that would be obvious to any onlooker at a glance (such as being an alien, the fact they’re a robot, etc.) requires some minor deceit on an author’s part in my view, or at least the sin of omission in that the character is obviously never described very well.
Still, despite the slightly formulaic sections, this is an enjoyable novel with some nice twists and turns that manages to dodge the standard clichés of at least one of its two subgenres. I’m looking forward to reading Kameron Hurley’s next book.
Three point five protagonists of indeterminate sex out of five. -
A welcome addition to the military science fiction sub-genre. Sure, many comparisons were made with Starship Troopers, Forever War, All You Need is Kill, and so on, but of course the book offers something else.
I listened to the audio version, narrated by the awesome Cara Gee (Camina Drummer in The Expanse series). Her voice definitely captured the badassery of the main character, Dietz, a soldier working for TeneSilvia, one of the six big corporations who controlled the Earth in some form of dystopic futuristic world that actually reminded me of Butler's Parable of the Talent. The way she and other troopers deployed was not via drop ships but by transforming them into 'light'. Dietz first jump apparently threw her into different points of her own timeline in a non-linear manner. It's not really a groundhog day occurrence like All You Need is Kill as the cycle's more complicated. Follow me so far? No? It's OK, because I only understood half of the mechanics anyway :D I must admit that I've not listened to audio for a while and I might have missed some stuff, zoning out during the navel-gazing parts. Clearly a reread with e-book is a must.
The book was originally a short story for her patron at Patreon, so I read it before. I remembered being drawn by the endearing voice of Dietz.
Yet, I feel the book could be tighter, and maybe a teensy bit less philosophical? Nevertheless, maybe since I am familiar about her politics and am myself surrounded with similar people, so I feel I have not found anything new. Like the evil corporation stuff, I wished it was more nuanced.
But ... maybe that's not the point. The lack of (my preferred) worldbuilding was compensated by a character who's determined and relentless, choosing her own fate, fighting for all people she loved, family and squad, because that's what matters, not which side of the war. -
A tough read during COVID, relentlessly gritty & dark, excellent social commentary, a mindfuck of a timeline that requires your attention, and it all ends with a bang (or a blink 😉). So awesome!
-
4.5 stars rounded down because I almost ditched it in the first 50 pages. The first part is a very mundane, been there, done that, boot camp for soldiers. But then Dietz goes on a "drop" and we get Phillip K. Dick + The Forever War. Mind blown! Both with Hurley's creativity and the way she weaves her social commentary in without feeling pedantic. Constant nods to the futile charge of the actual Light Brigade with a twist on where the orders come from plus a pervasive unsettled feeling wondering if Dietz is sane or what is actually happening.
I was also delighted (thanks Alex Honnold for that word) with the which you find out about halfway through the book.
2 for 2 thumbs up on Hurley's books. I will certainly try more. -
Me ha encantado esta novela y me ha sorprendido también un poco, tras haber leído otras novelas de la autora. Es ciencia ficción con un sabor más clásico que la que suele escribir. No digo que no sea innovadora, ni que no se note la mano de Hurley, que se nota. Nos lleva a un mundo dominado por las grandes corporaciones, convulso y en guerra cuasi permanente. El personaje protagonista se alista en el ejército por puro idealismo, pero lo que va descubriendo hace surgir dudas que no podrá resolver hasta el final.
Hay mucha acción, pero no hay batallas épicas (más bien "cagadas" épicas). Es una novela con mensaje claramente antibelicista y anticapitalista. Se dice que es la respuesta de Hurley a la novela de Heinlein "Starship Troopers" y en ciertos momentos (las escenas de guerra) me ha recordado a la película de Verhoeven. Y también a otra película, "Al filo del mañana", de 2014. Yo ahí lo dejo.
Recomendable para amantes de la ciencia ficción.
Edito para mencionar a la traductora, Natalia Cervera. Normalmente no se me ocurren cosas que decir sobre las traducciones, por pura ignorancia. Pero en el caso de este libro, con la lectura ya bastante avanzada, me di cuenta de que no sabía si algunos personajes eran masculinos o femeninos. Puede ser puro despiste mío, pero supongo que está hecho así a propósito, para enfatizar el hecho de que el género no tiene por qué definir ni el papel del personaje ni sus relaciones con el resto. Entonces empecé a fijarme en los adjetivos y más o menos pude asignar un género a cada uno. Pero, claro, resulta que en inglés los adjetivos no tienen género. Así que, si a mi me costó en castellano, imagino lo que le debió costar a a traductora (porque tampoco hay muchos pronombres que digamos).
Reseña más extensa en ConsuLeo:
https://consuleoluegoexisto.com/2020/...
