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A review by tsunni
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
This is like a mix of Cyberpunk, Full Metal Jacket, Old Man's War, and time travel; a deliberately confusing mix of the horrors of war and jumping through time and obedience to too-powerful all-surveilling corporations manufacturing reality for their own gain. Expertly written in easy to read prose and bluntly disturbing imagery, the story viewpoint follows the main character Dietz, a poor nobody subcitizen who enlists in a corporate army for a chance to be a privileged member of society in some impossibly distant timeframe, and we watch her go completely mad (or go completely sane) over the course of the book as it jumps between a discordant number of timeframes, scifi tech horrors, and brutal scenes of war.
I didn't find the jumping and out of order timeframes too confusing to follow, but I also think we're not entirely meant to be able to keep up with it; it's not what the book is about. Instead I was hit harder by how much Dietz's world was an extension of our own, how reality was whatever the powerful wanted it to be, how dehumanized and mindless she was deliberately trained to become, how class warfare and misinformation was weaponized, how people are broken down and seen as disposable by the powerful. I think this story emotionally resounded with me because I see so many parallels with the directions the US and other parts of the western world has been going lately (especially today, a day after the US Supreme Court struck down the Chevron Doctrine).
Unlike Starship Troopers, which is the obvious direct novel comparison and a book I'd never liked, the clear message here in The Light Brigade -- one given in an almost direct author-to-reader plea in a forgivable deus ex machina ending -- is that the power to change all this for the better resides in the people, and reality is what we can make it; if we could scrape together the willpower to do it. Whether that's the right answer or not to our societal woes (and I don't expect Hurley or anyone else to have a simple answer, because there isn't one), I really enjoyed this novel and what it tried to do, and I think it's one I'd reread at some point.
I didn't find the jumping and out of order timeframes too confusing to follow, but I also think we're not entirely meant to be able to keep up with it; it's not what the book is about. Instead I was hit harder by how much Dietz's world was an extension of our own, how reality was whatever the powerful wanted it to be, how dehumanized and mindless she was deliberately trained to become, how class warfare and misinformation was weaponized, how people are broken down and seen as disposable by the powerful. I think this story emotionally resounded with me because I see so many parallels with the directions the US and other parts of the western world has been going lately (especially today, a day after the US Supreme Court struck down the Chevron Doctrine).
Unlike Starship Troopers, which is the obvious direct novel comparison and a book I'd never liked, the clear message here in The Light Brigade -- one given in an almost direct author-to-reader plea in a forgivable deus ex machina ending -- is that the power to change all this for the better resides in the people, and reality is what we can make it; if we could scrape together the willpower to do it. Whether that's the right answer or not to our societal woes (and I don't expect Hurley or anyone else to have a simple answer, because there isn't one), I really enjoyed this novel and what it tried to do, and I think it's one I'd reread at some point.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Torture, Death, Gore, Classism, Gun violence, Murder, Body horror, and Violence