Tuesday, April 23, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley



The Light Brigade is the latest book from SF/F author Kameron Hurley, and is her first foray into the MilSci (Military Science Fiction) genre.  Hurley's works are generally in the grimdark spectrum of the SF/F genre, with her worldbreaker saga trilogy having lost me 2/3 of the way through for being just too dark, though I enjoyed her last book, The Stars Are Legion from 2017 (which was still dark, but worked a lot more for me).  They're also books that are never afraid to make interesting choices and to get more than a little weird - Hurley's characters are rarely boring and her ideas are always at least interesting in concept, so I was very interested to see what she'd do with the MilSci genre.

Note:  I've seen other reviews and blurbs compare this book to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which this book is arguably a response to, but I haven't read Starship Troopers or even seen the movie, so I have no perspective to speak about that.

What she does with the genre - and make no mistake this is a grim dystopian version of MilSci, as you should expect from Hurley - in The Light Brigade is use the novel to tell a really strong story with some serious ideas about beliefs, ideals, propaganda, fear, hopes, and to a lesser extent governance.  Hurley is not subtle about her theses about these ideas - they are spelled out quite clearly in the text, but the story around these expositions is strong at showing off those concepts in action, with a really strong lead character to carry the story, which is disorienting (deliberately!) in a way that truly works.


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
In a distant (or not too distant?) future, Earth is governed by the Big Six Corporations, with individuals belonging to each corporation.  Individuals need to work hard to obtain a better status for them and their families - to be declared a resident and given more rights, or to be declared a citizen and given more rights for example.  The one exception to this system seemed to be Mars, where an independent populace was established supposedly under socialist principles.....before Martian peoples returned to Earth and started a war against the rest of the Earth and in a single act, "The Blink," destroyed the entire city of Sao Paulo.

Dietz enlists in the Corporation military to get revenge for the Blink and endures brutal training, meant to break soldiers down, in order to be part of the Corps.  The foundation of the military is the technology to turn soldiers into beams of light and to beam them anywhere, and Dietz fights for the opportunity to be one of those soldiers.  But when Dietz finally gets that chance, the mission Dietz finds themselves on is not the mission Dietz expected going in - nor are Dietz' companions the same as the ones who beamed out with them.  It soon becomes apparent that something strange is happening with Dietz' jumps, and that Dietz is not experiencing the war in the same way as everyone else.....but what Dietz does experience are constant horrors that seem to never end - horrors that leave it unclear whether Dietz is the hero they thought they were....or the villain.
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The above summary is difficult to write for a few reasons: one, because I don't want to spoil anything about the book, and two, this book is very much driven by its lead character, Dietz, and well....Hurley doesn't reveal Dietz' gender until the very end of the book, and I don't want to spoil (using they/theirs pronouns isn't a perfect solution above, though I'm using it, because Dietz does indeed have a gender).  That gender part serves kind of a minor purpose - that the horrors of war and the issues involved in this book exist for all genders - but in comparison to the grand scope of Hurley's thesis, it almost feels like a distraction.*

*I feel like this would work better anyhow as an idea if Hurley had NEVER revealed Dietz' gender, which is where I thought the book was going, but there is such a reveal at the end, which is kind of strange honestly.*  

Which is to say that Hurley is dealing with some pretty strong themes here about the world that are very obviously pertinent to our world today.  Hurley deals with these themes and her thesis in two ways: first through the plot of the book, written in first person by Dietz from some future perspective, which covers most of the book, and through occasional interludes in different font that show an unidentified interrogator dealing with a unidentified captured insurgent, in which Hurley is more blatantly and explicitly laying out her thesis on the issues of this book: the power of beliefs (both rational and irrational), propaganda, the use of fear or hope to control people, and more.  The combination of Dietz' experiences prevents these screeds from feeling too much like a preachy essay, and allows them to work quite well - essentially Hurley is both showing and telling through the story, making both forms of writing more successful.

I should point out that Dietz is an excellent character who is quite believable throughout this story and the general storyline is really really well done to showcase Dietz as a character.  There aren't really many other notable characters throughout since Dietz' story requires them to change companions constantly (the closest most interesting side character is one fellow soldier named Tanaka), but Dietz is excellent at showing the warrior not only facing the horrors of war, but facing them in a way that makes one question all of their own beliefs and change their actions respectively.

The book has some flaws, despite its excellence - aside from the gender distraction honestly.  The story takes a little bit to get going, and while I see upon a reread how the earlier parts before the book's main gimmick gets revealed are building toward the rest of the book, they kind of feel like they're just in the way of everything getting going in a way you know they're going to from the beginning.  And the twist - which works despite the fact I predicted it midway through - relies on a sort of time skip to work which feels kind of off.

Still, The Light Brigade is Hurley's strongest work that I've read and very relevant to today's environment.  Recommended.
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