The Light Brigade - Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade is a multifaceted, scintillating, bloody gem of a book. It’s a masterclass in sci-fi from Kameron Hurley, whose other works have always had that perfect blend of interesting ideas and emotional impact. This latest, a sci-fi story in what may be our near future, has the same energy and a raw, visceral feel that keeps the text grounded even while exploring some high concept ideas.

This is a book about conflict. At one level, that conflict is a concrete one. Mega-corporations which now run the world struggle with each other for dominance. And while they engage in a cold war with each other, they also have a hot war with Mars, where a different branch of humanity does not appear to regard them kindly. Our protagonist is a front line soldier in this war, and through their eyes we get a view of guts and mud and horror.

This is also a story about more personal conflicts. About the sacrifices people make internally, the hurt they do to themselves while working within systems that limit their potential. About the self justifications that allow that to continue. About how someone makes it through the day, when they don’t know if they will, in fact, make it through the day. This is, after all, a war run by corporate entities, who are almost equally effective at dehumanising their own troops and those of their enemies. But people fight through this. The narrative lets us see people at their best, under the pressure to do anything to win, deciding who they’ll become, how far they’re willing to go, and for what cause.

I’m not sure I can fully describe how visceral, how horrifying and immediate and brutal the scenes in the active war zones are. They’re typically fast-paced, snappy, with a thread of tension running through them like a razor-edged tripwire. Nobody is safe. The connection our interlocutor feels to their squad mates has some real emotional weight, and I found myself sympathising with these grunts as they trekked through mud and ruined cities, as they were asked to do more and more appalling things for a command structure which felt so far removed as to be more alien than the individuals they were fighting against.

This is a conflict whose futility is written in the actions of the people fighting it; the increasing disaffection and rage some feel at doing sounds in parallel with those who just want it all to be over. This is a conflict of exhaustion, of atrocity, of disenfranchised rage against a slow slide into seemingly inevitable disaster. Each page is searing, an indictment of a society which isn’t more than a few steps away from our own.

So it’s a story about conflicts, personal and systemic, played out through the lens of a near-future war. Maybe that’s enough to get you to pick it up and turn some pages.

It’s also a top notch character piece. Sitting behind the eyes of our protagonist, we live through the conflict with them. We learn about their past, the matter-of-fact horrors that shaped their trajectory before the story began. We learn about their loves, and about the ideals which they hold close to their heart. We learn about their mistakes, and see them commit what might be unforgivable acts, under the aegis of war. We see them struggle to forgive themselves and others for similar acts. This is someone drowning, trying to remain human whilst the environment militates against humanity.

The characterisation is, I would suggest, top-flight. The feelings we gain from our narrator have an honesty to them, an immediacy which makes them feel real; and their inner voice is thoughtful, aware of its limitations, a regular person playing out a situation which is pretty irregular. The supporting cast are an intriguing bunch as well – by turns villainous, conflicted, complex, unfeeling, affectionate, treacherous and loyal. They are, to sum up, people, and they shape the world by being seen as people through our protagonist. Some of them aren’t very nice people, but that’s neither here nr there -w hat they are is real, one way or another.

So you’ve got a war, a conflict in a vivid and believable world that lets us explore ideas about wealth and violence, about humanity and personal and institutional power, under the hood of an adrenaline-stoked struggle. And you’ve got characters who feel real, who live and die for each other, whose passions and needs come right off the page. The story is stylistically clever too, smoothly moving between non-linear sections; the reader working alongside our protagonist to make sense of their dislocation. Plotting this out, working out which pieces g where and when, which are visible to the reader and the narrator at which time, must have been a nightmare. But as a means of getting the story across, it’s perfect; as the clouds begin to lift, as quite what’s happening becomes clearer to our protagonist, so too the lines of story begin to join up for the reader. The plotting is intricate work, which pays off admirably over the course of the story.

But there’s other ideas here, too. I won’t touch on it too much for fear of spoilers, but there’s this: In order to move soldiers around, in order to take part in an interplanetary conflict, the corporations have found a way to turn their soldiers into light. To shift them across the world (or worlds) instantly, to reconstitute them, and let them hit the ground fighting immediately. But this is a process with costs. Some come back broken, some come back dead, some come back mad. What they see in that disembodied journey is a mystery, and one which might change the course of history.

This is Hurley at her best. It’s a story about people – real people. Not always good people. Often the opposite. Sometimes beaten, broken, fighting, furious people. But always people. And it’s a story which asks big questions about society – about the way we shape it, and it shapes us. It’s also a book which plays with some big sci-fi ideas in innovative and clever ways, and will reward an in-depth read.

Hurley’s really knocked it out of the park with this one – give it a try.