RogerBW's Blog: The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley

2019 science fiction. The rebellious Martian colonists wiped out São Paulo in a devastating surprise attack. Dietz, whose family was among the dead, joins up with the corporate armies to fight them off – and maybe end up with citizenship.

So yes, well, of course this is a response to Starship Troopers. And I can picture some people who loved that book hating this one simply because it reaches different conclusions. I regard it as saying not that that book was wrong but that it was naïve and incomplete: that the idea of citizenship being dependent on service is not of itself a sufficient means of bringing about a good society, and may even be an actively unhelpful one, depending on just who's in charge.

Certainly this is a book with a message, indeed several, but it isn't a Message Book. Dietz tries to make sense of what's happening, stick to the brief, and come to terms with the ongoing desire to be one of the good guys in a war that distinctly lacks them.

I strongly suspect that most military sf is written by people who think the military system is basically a good thing and would be happy if their readers joined up; and that Hurley does not feel this way (all this as distinct from how one feels about individuals who are or have been part of that system). So we have the standard mil-SF trope of the last conversations with pre-enlistment friends, we have the obligatory boot camp sequence, we have the deployments; but we also have Dietz' realisation of just how this is all working, how if you make a human feel like crap they'll grasp for any little bit of acceptance and praise. And yet Dietz doesn't regard this as entirely a negative thing, in part because it clearly has worked.

So far so allegorical, but things get more complicated. These soldiers are sent into battle by being "converted into light", i.e. teleported (and most of them arrive intact most of the time). But very quickly it becomes apparent that the mission Dietz goes on isn't always the one that's supposed to follow the briefing. And back at base afterwards, it may turn out to be the aftermath of yet a third mission… of course many writers like to shuffle a story out of order in order to lend interest where there isn't enough in telling it straight, but here there is already enough interest, and there's an in-world reason for shuffling the story. Normally this style of narrative puts me off books, but here it works.

Things do get off to a bit of a slow start, but I felt that Dietz could be forgiven for taking a while to work out both what's going on and what it makes sense to do about it.

There are shades of Haldeman's Forever Peace towards the end here, and nobody would accuse Hurley of writing hard SF, but this book doesn't pretend to be about the tech anyway. (There are drones, but there's also recognisable artillery and rifle fire.) This is a sociological comment on how the military gets used, and on how to recognise when you might be the Imperial Stormtrooper. But also it's an exploration of Dietz's state of mind, suffering not only from combat fatigue but from living life profoundly out of order and never knowing what's going to come next. It's really very good indeed – and I say that as someone who bounced hard off God's War.

I've now read all the Hugo-nominated novels apart from the McGuire, and if I were voting this year I'd put this book at the top of my list. (Though The Future of Another Timeline would still be above it if that had been nominated.)

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