Hugo Award-winning author Kameron Hurley has been blazing a trail in recent years in writing gritty, fast-paced, visceral science fiction. The Light Brigade is no different.
I deliberately went into this one with no idea of what it was about. However, it soon became apparent that the first part of the book was going to be like your typical military-sf story. Told from the perspective of new recruit Dietz, in the future Earth is now at war with the Martians, humans who separated themselves from Earth years ago. Dietz is a typical example of an idealistic recruit with a troubled background, a ghoul (a person without rights) who has signed on wanting to become a citizen, to make a difference and fight back after ‘the Blink’, which was seen as a Martian attack that involved the vaporisation of part of Sao Paulo, Dietz’s home city.
The first third of the book tells of the recruitment and training of Dietz towards this objective. It’s rather expected but well done – lots of challenges, swearing and buddy bonding. It’s rather like an upgraded version of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as Dietz enters basic training, although as you might expect in a twenty-first century version there’s copious swearing, regular reference to sex and lots of graphic descriptions involving vomit and excrement.
If the first part is rather what you expect, in the second act things get interesting, as Starship Troopers turns into Edge of Tomorrow. It is important to know that Dietz and her fellow combatants are part of ‘The Light Brigade’, transported to their battle-zones by being discorporated into light – think of it as being like how Captain Kirk gets beamed down onto a planet but on a massive scale. Understandably, this can be quite frightening and initially disorientating, as it doesn’t always work – there are various occasions of soldiers appearing in a unpleasantly remodelled state or even partly within physical objects – walls, floors, etc.
On her first drop Dietz finds the travel odd but also that the rest of her team have disappeared – although she is blamed, she doesn’t know why or where they’ve gone to. Dietz becomes known as “Bad Luck Dietz”, the soldier who lost her whole platoon on her first jump. Successive jumps get weirder – she begins to imagine ghosts from her past, and even stranger, she arrives in combat zones in different units, where they know her but she doesn’t recognise them. It appears that she is not only appearing in different futures but also at different places in time.
This then leads us to understand the bigger picture. The war is more complex that we think, with different corporations fighting the war, with the possibility that Dietz isn’t just fighting ‘free’ Martians but other corps under an alternate name. At the same time there’s a narrative strand that is a transcript of Dietz being interrogated as a possible Martian traitor, which suggests that things in the future may not be what we (or she) expects.
There’s also a personal cost. Dietz finds that the moral lines between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are complex and confused, especially when she also seems to jump forward and backward in time. As things seem more muddled, friends become foes, lovers become estranged, and allies become enemies. There are schemes galore, between different corporations and alternate factions, complicated by the fact that Dietz herself becomes confused as to what she is doing and where she is. It is revealed to her through her mysterious gaps in time and memory that the future for Earth is not looking good.
The ending brings all these elements together. It is sophisticated and fiendishly clever in combining multiple timelines and alternate futures. Whilst at one point I feared that Kameron had overreached herself and made things just too unlikely, the denouement is pleasingly good. It wears its influences proudly and is better than the pun-ish tile suggests.
In my opinion, the best science fiction tells a story that is engaging and entertaining but also reflects the world it is written in. Along the way, Kameron manages to show us a mirror to our present society by examining issues of race, culture, propaganda and fake news, the futility of war and the endurance of grunts in a bad situation with a horrible job to do. It is a story where Dietz loses herself but eventually finds herself – different and yet better, tempered by the horrors she experiences. War is hell and the story reflects this. It does not glorify violence but instead shows us the life of a grunt.
The Light Brigade is a twisty-turny upgrade alternative to Starship Troopers or The Forever War, combined with Edge of Tomorrow. It grips from the start, is engagingly sassy and motors along at a pace that leads to a clever conclusion. I’ve read a lot of similar novels to this, but this is one of the best I’ve read. Recommended for those who like their military-sf but also want something to think about as well.
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
Published by Angry Robot, April 2019
ISBN: 978-0857668233
341 pages
Review by Mark Yon
