Become the light and fight: Review of The Light Brigade

Cover of The Light brigade. Review by Markus McDowell

Kameron Hurley. The Light Brigade. Angry Robot, 2019. 400pp.

This book was a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award novel, losing to A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (see my review). The latter is a more complex and detailed world-building novel, though I would not have been surprised had The Light Brigade taken the honor. It is a fascinating new take on space opera/galactic war novels like Starship Troopers or The Forever War.

They said the war would turn us into light…
The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief–no matter what actually happens during combat.
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 it is.
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..
Amazon.com

I enjoy stories that play around with timelines, whether time travel (though is there much left that is new?) or narrative/literary time travel (many of my short stories and a couple of novels). In this book, the protagonist experiences her life out-of-time because of a glitch in the transportation technology—she finds herself living her life out of sequence. Though the book is a classic “galactic war” novel, as noted above, this interesting twist makes it unique and fun.

The mystery of when she is living, and the driving prose and full characters make for an easy read. The battlefield descriptions and struggles of the characters are realistic and compelling.

Often, science fiction presents social commentary in a speculative genre to bring some distance (and therefore hopefully perspective) to the topic. Hurley’s setting is that huge corporations control society and individuals—everyone works for one of them, including the soldiers in the novel. In turn, the government uses the corporations to control the economy and society.

This trope is so overdone (evil mega-corporations in league with a Marxist government), and Hurley gives us no new insights or challenges the prevailing wisdom of the trope.

That critique aside, if you enjoy this classic sub-genre with the technology/psychologic twist, you will find this enjoyable

Hurley is a novelist and short-story writer, and won the Hugo Award in _ for _The Stars Are Legion. Visit her website at KameronHurley.com.