The Light Brigade

I still can't believe she gave this a happy ending. Or at least, a hopeful one. Kameron Hurley, you have a tender heart after all.

I struggled with this. Not because it isn't good. It's very good. But because while some part of me thought that military sci-fi would be a reasonable escape from our current realities, The Light Brigade is not that kind of book. It is set in the future, and is about time travel, but it is very much about our present. Dietz is a new recruit, motivated by the Martian attack that wiped out Sao Paolo, and looking to fight some Martians. (Dietz's gender is left ambiguous through the majority of the book. The purpose of this is open to interpretation, but clearly intentional on Hurley's part, so I'm just going to refer to Dietz as they/them so you get to have the intended experience if you choose to read this). The war is fought by sending soldiers out on beams of light, breaking down their atoms and reassembling them thousands of miles - and sometimes worlds - away. But after Dietz's first drop, they realize that something is very wrong. The place they went was not where they were supposed to go. There were new faces, new teams, and Dietz can only do what they can to keep up. Dietz begins to experience the war entirely out of order, not knowing if those in charge know and are allowing it to happen, or if they are a second away from being disappeared. Whether everything that is happening is a preordained loop, or if they can possibly change it.

This book is brutal. Somehow I forgot that Kameron Hurley is big on that. It's gross, there's a ton of body horror, a lot of gore and misery. It's war, baby. The prose is very action oriented, and Dietz is not presented as a particularly deep thinker, but still a complicated person. The world of The Light Brigade is one controlled entirely by corporations. You have to earn citizenship to even remotely be allowed basic freedoms and privileges. It is a bleak portrait of what's to come, and it's tough to read right now. I had to push myself through it, when all I wanted to do was reread Harry Potter and scroll through TikTok to get me that sweet serotonin. So why didn't I put it aside and save it for a happier time? Well, for one, there's little guarantee that time will be anytime soon. And two, this book has something to say.

In fact, I think in many ways this is why Hurley puts you through those 300 pages of misery - so she can tell you it doesn't have to be this way. There's always a choice, there's always something to fight for, and there will always be moments where you have to take a step back and wonder why someone wants you to believe them so badly. Who profits from your oppression? Also, aside from the content, this book is pretty easy to read. It moves quickly and impressively the time travel is only a little bit confusing. The characters, while not very richly drawn, are still distinct and paint Dietz's world in interesting and ever-shifting patterns. It's fun to watch this angry grunt start to care about the people around them.

I think, maybe, one of the reasons why Dietz's gender is mostly left up the reader, and why they are drawn so sparsely, is because Hurley wants you to put yourself in Dietz shoes. The world painted in this book could very easily happen, and if it does, what would you do? Despite the deeply grounded nature of the rest of the book, the ending is very open. It's as though she's asking you - how would you end this story? What future would you choose?

I initially gave this 4 stars but I've bumped it to 5 because I keep thinking about how good it was.

When I finished it I wanted to immediately reread it to pick up on everything I missed, and see it again with the knowledge of what's going on, because I definitely lost the thread a bit in the middle, this spoiler-stuffed comment on Reddit really helped me https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/bx6lug/comment/eq4w4n2/

Having read that, I saw the brilliance of the novel, it's really expertly put together. I just missed a lot through inattentive reading. Even with that though, the character of Dietz is engaging and human, and Hurley has obviously gone to some effort to flip gender norms in some places, and play down the importance of gender in others which is really refreshing. A little hard to visualise some characters, and sometimes you have to retroactively change the gender you imagined someone to be, but that's quite fun actually.

What's less fun is losing track of who is who and what's happened already, but the writing is so good that even if you don't know what's going on you still enjoy it. Again, I lay the blame for losing track at my own feet, I should have read it in bigger chunks and without taking days off.

Glad I read it, would read more from Hurley.