Review - The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade
Kameron Hurley
Angry Robot, 2 April 2019
PB, 358pp, e

I'm grateful to Angry Robot for a free advance e-copy of The Light Brigade via NetGalley.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book.

I don't normally read military SF, and can't quite remember what prompted me to ask for The Light Brigade despite it falling in that genre. Possibly Hurley's name - I have wanted to read something by her for a while? Anyway, for the first part of the book, I was worried I'd made the wrong choice. It is very military. We get Dietz, a raw recruit from an impoverished family, joining the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps and immediately being flung into intensive, not to say gruelling, training by a merciless drill instructor. ('This is how they break you').

Then the missions - the grunts line up on the field and are broken down into beams of light, reassembled at the target and straight into heavy combat, depicted in note-perfect accounts, complete with lost comrades, tactical chaos and atrocities. It's very intense, almost hyper-real, and I wouldn't, I think, want to read a whole book like that.

But.

BUT.

The whole book isn't like that. While the military stuff doesn't go away, and it's not just backdrop, that's not all there is here, by a long, long chalk. For me, three factors lift The Light Brigade to a different plane.

Maybe I should put this differently. I hate that thing where a reviewer says "this book is genre X but it has stuff Y in it that means it transcends that genre". I don't mean that. I mean, "this book is military SF, which is great but not my cup of tea, but it's also something else, which IS my cup of tea, my afternoon scone and my bowl of strawberries, all at the same time". I'm not saying it's a better book for not just being military SF, I'm saying it is a book that overlaps better with my interests and preferences.

So, the first thing that The Light Brigade is, besides being military SF, is a portrait of a dystopian, ruined society. One where all-powerful corporates have supplanted the State, operate their own armies, dictate who is and is not entitled to citizenship and impose a fascistic ideology to underpin their rule (the phrase 'final solution' occurs several times). It's a violent, hierarchical world with graduations from the 'ghouls' at the bottom, non-persons living in labour camps and on rubbish tips  ('being a ghoul means being hungry. Living in other people's waste. Praying a cough won't turn into pneumonia...') upwards to those with residence, to citizens, to the wealthy, all the way to the CEO of the Corporation.

Of course there are aspects of our world in this, as well as hints of the path by which things got to this state ('The more fearful and out of control we feel, the more we look to some big man on a horse of a tank or a beam of light to save us'. 'America... tore itself apart... drowned in a deluge of propaganda foisted upon an uneducated public with no formalised training in critical thinking...') and it's a chilling, plausible vision on both counts.

Then there's the second thing. The, you know, SF bit. That's here not just in the dressing - futuristic plasma rifles, the concept of being at war with a terraformed Mars, the 'knu' ('a complex system of quantum-entangled data nodes...'), 'slicks', suits that recycle the soldiers' wastes and bodily fluids - or in that central conceit of soldiers turned into light, beamed across the Solar System, and reassembled - but in a deeply twisty, mind-bending plot. Very soon after that moment when I wondered if I should go on, I got my answer as strange things started to happen to Dietz. I won't say exactly what they are because although we soon understand (kind of) what is going on, it takes much longer for us (and for Dietz) to understand why - and how the separate events hang together. Indeed it's Dietz's working out of that which drives the plot, as distinct from the ongoing military narrative (one that gets darker and darker, more and more enfolded in atrocity, treachery and bad faith - even as Dietz and comrades try to hold onto a sense of loyalty to each other, the first and last thing soldiers have).

The third thing is the portrayal of Dietz. A soldier, missing parents (father: disappeared by Tene-Silvia's internal police. Mother: dead from cancer. Brother: vanished when that thing, the Blink, took out São Paulo). 'The enemy had eaten my family... I wanted the enemy obliterated.' In a sense, The Light Brigade is a story of Dietz's growing up, coming to terms with the world through a chaotic jumble of disconnected battles, through the discovery of dark truths, anomalies. It's a difficult process, taking place as the world goes (even more) to Hell and everything that was certain melts away. In the course of it we come to know and like Dietz well.

Fittingly, the ending of such a process is murky, and one could argue the book doesn't actually provide much closure. Readers' responses to this will vary. I did find it satisfying - at times I thought we might get a neat and today resolution but that would have been something of a cop out.

Instead we're left to connect the pieces, piecing together what has happened, and how...

So I was glad I read this book, glad I didn't give up. I will certainly read more of Hurley's books and would strongly recommend this one.