Name: Szymon's review of The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
Item: The Light Brigade
Rating: 3
Author: Szymon

Kameron Hurley

NAMED BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AS A BEST BOOK OF 2019 From the Hugo Award­­–winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a brand-new science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars. They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world. 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 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. A worthy successor to classic stories like Downbelow Station, Starship Troopers, and The Forever War, The Light Brigade is award-winning author Kameron Hurley’s gritty time-bending take on the future of war.

The Light Brigade

Szymon

Sunky

Shona Tiger

3.5 Going to need to read this one again 😅

Jeff

Starship Troopers × All You Need is Kill × Heart of Darkness

Ryan LaFerney

Let me just start by saying: The Light Brigade, the new standalone science fiction time-travel novel by Kameron Hurley, is a resounding triumph and already one of my top reads of 2020. I loved it so much, I can't wait to read it again. 

The Light Brigade is in many ways the spiritual heir to Haldeman's The Forever War, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and Scalzi's The Old Man's War. The Light Brigade has a very modern tone, updated to our very real cultural moment of endless wars (think Iraq and Afghanistan) and corporate/media dominance and influence, xenophobia as well as our obsession with "fake news." It is also the spiritual heir to the works of PKD too, as The Light Brigade is quite the mind fuck as it juggles multiple timelines.

So what is it about?

Hurley’s future is a bleak one: six massive corporations run vast parts of society, controlling the media and privatizing services that their citizens have access to, provided they’ve signed extensive contracts. We’re introduced to Dietz, a young soldier who joins the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps in the aftermath of “The Blink,” an event that destroyed much of São Paulo (and Dietz's family among them) and has been blamed on colonists from Mars. 

That mysterious incident sparks an intense war, and Dietz signs up out of a desire to find some meaning in her life and to avenge the 2 million people who were blinked away, not thinking about what signing up might cost her personally.

Based on a short story Hurley published in 2015, The Light Brigade roughly follows the formula that Heinlein came up with decades ago. We follow Dietz’s progress through basic training where, as in books like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, trainees are pushed until they break, and are then rebuilt to obey orders and fight for whatever values they’re told. Hurley’s soldiers have a bit of tech that Heinlein and Haldeman’s didn’t have: teleportation. 

When called to active duty, Dietz (gender unspecified for most of the book, but you’ll figure it out fairly soon) experiences missions out of sequence with linear time, losing and regaining comrades, ordered to perform morally dubious actions which don’t seem to lead to victory, and gradually collecting information that strongly suggests that the enemy is not whom Dietz was told it was.

What is powerful about The Light Brigade is that Dietz is caught in a war that she can’t escape, but she has a unique vantage point; one that leads her to question the very nature of not only the war that she’s fighting, but of the entire society of which she’s a part. Dietz, with her unique way of experiencing the world, learns that her situation isn’t beyond her control, and that she has the power to change the state of the world.

Hurley's world is a feudalistic technological nightmare, where all citizens are defined by their host corporations. Freedom is an illusion. I once tried reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers and ended up throwing the book across the room because I couldn't shallow the idea implied that one has to earn their freedom through military service. While the world of The Light Brigade suggests freedom is an illusion (your essentially the property of a host corporation), Hurley does seem to suggest that free will does exist as Dietz learns that the key to her entire predicament comes down to taking control of her situation in order to save everyone. 

The Light Brigade contains many homages to other sci-fi classics beyond just the above mentioned names. There is obviously a Star Trek influence. And there is a reference to Dune. With is to say: scifi nerds will love this book.

Read this if you enjoy challenging, thought-provoking and REVELANT military sci-fi that isn't afraid of a little body horror while challenging the status quo.

Didi Chanoch

I don't like military SF. I need you to understand that when I say I didn't just like Kameron Hurley's The Light Brigade. I loved it. 

This is a novel of war and time travel, that is as fierce an anti-war book as any Catch 22 or Good Soldier Švejk - though definitely not as comedic. This is the sort of novel science fiction was invented for. 

In her excellent review in the NY Times, Amal El-Mohtar called this novel "Full Metal Jacket meets Edge of Tomorrow," and that is a brilliant take. 

As a supporter of Hurley's Patreon, I was lucky enough to read the original story that was the basis for this novel. I really liked it, but it truly was just the seed from which the novel grew.

This is most definitely a military SF novel. It is brutal and harsh. People die. A lot. But it is also a hopeful novel, and one that most definitely does not glorify war. I am very likely to put it on my Hugo ballot next year.

sophia n

I SEE YOU COMRADE HURLEY!!!

this was so good lmao and not at all what i expected it to be about honestly. i was comparing it to a lot of different sff media in my mind in the beginning, but it really became it’s own thing by the end, and i loved that. super fun idea and a really enjoyable pace and premise. i keep thinking about it over a week after having finished it which is great. i'm not totally sure what's keeping me from 5 stars, i think probably just because i had a bit of a hard time connecting with the main character, especially in the beginning. but it's a very high 4 stars, def recommend if you like the sound of it or are into time travel shenanigans.

jess

I think The Light Brigade was one of my most unexpected books of 2021. I don't read sci-fi too much, and I'm only interested in military fiction on the basis of my interest in military history, so this book came out of left field. The Light Brigade is a brutal, relentless view of the future in a decaying militaristic capitalist world led by an intriguing protagonist, and I was engrossed in every page. 

Our protagonist is Dietz, a recruit in the corporate military. Kameron Hurley does something interesting with Dietz--we don't know all too much about Dietz's history before enlistment. We know about as much of Dietz's history as we do about most of the other recruits, and yet Dietz has such a sharp narrative voice that Dietz's point of view is immediately intriguing. Oh, Dietz is definitely a bit rough around the edges, a bit worn down, but it's the military we're talking about. Who isn't? Hurley uses the genre and Dietz's first-person narration to play with readers' perceptions of military fiction in a way I've never seen done before, and if you don't want to be spoiled about that, you'll have to just read the book. 

(But I do want to say my thoughts, so: (view spoiler)[about 150 pages into the book, I realized that Dietz's gender hadn't been mentioned. We know Dietz has a girlfriend back home. The corps is gender neutral. I'd been imagining Dietz as a man until that point, until I combed back and realized that no one uses pronouns for Dietz. Dietz's gender is eventually revealed near the end of the book, and Dietz's first name in the last few pages. Dietz's gender is not important to the story, apart from the interpretation the reader has going through the book again, once you know. Rather, I think it's a commentary on the broad homogeneity and dehumanization of the military. You are your rank and last name and what you can do for the military-industrial complex. Nothing more. And I thought -- god, I thought that was fucking genius. If I did not have Pandemic Brain and if I had polished Academic Literary Analysis Brain I would have SO MUCH MORE to say about this, because, wow. (hide spoiler)])

This book is bleak, and it is gory. Actually, reading it so soon after The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang and The Conqueror's Saga by Kiersten White has me drawing definite comparisons despite the difference in genre over all three books, and, oh, maybe this book wasn't such an unexpected favourite for me, now that I'm considering the running themes of war and trauma and what to do when we can't save the people we love. Because The Light Brigade takes an unfiltered look at war that refuses to romanticize the battlefield. War Is Hell, folks, and war will always be hell. Despite the sci-fi element to this book, this book is another emotional look at the experience of war and a critique of the contemporary military-industrial complex and it is gut-wrenching and at times nauseating. 

I honestly cannot recommend enough, if you're into brutal science fiction stories, or military fiction. Not only is it a fast read that will have you turning pages as fast as your eyes can scan the words, The Light Brigade is a book that will make you think about the state of the world as we know it and consider our own future and our own present long after the story is over. 

content warnings | war, genocide, gore, death, violence

representation | bisexual main character

elif sinem

INJECT THAT COMMIE SF DIRECTLY INTO MY VEINS!!! it's a bit confusing to read with the timelines that happen, and I'm not sure if I was with the prose or Dietz as a character (though I think Dietz has fantastic moments), so it's a 4 for now but I really want to read this again.

Sheila

Fucking brutal and fantastic! Hurley never pulls her punches & this latest book is another knockout.

Anastaciya

Ben Nathan

It's a solid 1.5 stars. This is not a good book. The ideas are not original. The way it tells the story isn't either. Is it the best military sci fi of the year? Maybe, but only because not that many (if any) others came out. Is it the best time travel book of the year? No. Recursion was great. Is the world interesting? Sort of. If you've read the comic Lazarus, imagine taking that world and making it flatter and less interesting but then adding in Mars for literally no reason at all.

Nothing in this book was good other than the prose. That part was fine, but it doesn't make up for how incredibly subpar this whole experience of the book was. How did this get nominated?

Heather Killeen

WOW. 
This book was INTENSE. A thriller sci-fi is definitely a good description, but it's also hilarious, emotional, smart, has queer rep, and I loved every moment of this heart-pounding ride! Also, the audiobook was fantastically narrated by Cara Gee from the Expanse! 

Recommend to: Fans of Blake Crouch and the movie Edge of Tomorrow.

Liz Griffin

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley earned a 5-star rating from me, both for the story itself and the storytelling style. Gritty war story meets science fiction suspense novel, The Light Brigade follows Dietz, a fresh-faced recruit in a chillingly believable future where corporations have become the global government and the Martian colonists have supposedly gone rogue. In order to rapidly deploy troops to the front, the corporations have developed the technology to break soldiers down into light for immediate transportation, a more horrific version of Willy Wonka's WonkaVision.

Also, the audiobook is fantastic, as read by actress Cara Gee (Drummer on The Expanse Amazon TV series).

Read my full review here: Book Review: The Light Brigade

Bryan Alexander

The Light Brigade is a science fiction antiwar novel, following a future soldier in a dystopian world as she participates in a conflict that becomes increasingly chaotic and devastating. 

I came to this with high expectations, and initially enjoyed the book, but gradually disengaged.

Why? I very much liked my first Hurley, The Stars are Legion, and this started off with a similar vibe: very intense, a dark world, many female characters. But over time... it faded.

First, a risk of military fiction is that non-narrating characters can be thinly sketched, due to the dehumanization of war, the necessity of describing complex situations, and casualties taking people out of the picture. That's true throughout The Light Brigade. I could not keep track of anyone other than the heroine. Names marched and shouted past us in a hurry and just skated off.

Second, the plot is largely in place about 1/3rd of the way in, and just keeps hammering away after that. That's partly because of one plot device ((view spoiler)[time travel, our heroine spilled back and forth across her history (hide spoiler)]). There's one nominal mystery, who the interrogation subject is, but it's pretty clear 1/2way in.

Third, it's an ambitious novel, and signals that throughout. The first page nods to Heinlein's Starship Troopers (South American city killed as the war's initiating action). Vonnegut is invoked (our heroine is "unstuck in time" explicitly) as is LeGuin (a character named a version of "Omelas"). The antiwar stance, the shambolic discipline, the distortions of time as a way of showing the separation of wartime experience, all tip the hat to Haldeman's Forever War. But The Light Brigade falls short of these ambitions. There's nothing added to those priors. War is hell, yes. Dystopia is bad. LeGuin's ethical choice is absent. That war separates veterans from the rest of society is barely touched on, as we spend just about every moment in formations. The gender shift away from Heinlein's male focus doesn't amount to anything.

Fourth, the world is, well, cartoonish. The evil corporations that run the world are mustache-twirling caricatures. I'm on board with the idea, but the villains have zero depth and their world makes no sense (are these company towns?). By the end of the book every bit involving them felt like a placeholder, [insert anti-corporate text here]. Otherwise, the world has weirdly not really advanced over the next few centuries, besides the light-teleportation tech, which doesn't work all that well. The titular Light Brigade (178) never actually does anything, since Dietz never really connects with them, and she does stuff on her own.

By the end I had a hard time scrounging up caring, just like Carlex. Battle and recovery scenes sped by, the plot remained in place, and I had just a mild interest in how it turned out. Maybe this is a case of a sharp short story inflated into book length.

Szymon &
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

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