The Light Brigade
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Soldiers are broken into light and sent to the frontline of a brutal interplanetary war, in this brilliant military SF from the Hugo Award-winning author of The Stars Are Legion.
The Light Brigade: it's what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back...different. Grunts in the corporate corps get broken into light, travelling from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief -- no matter what happens during combat.
Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops which don't sync up with the platoon's. And the bad drops tell a story of war that's not what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think it is. Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero -- or maybe even a villain. In war it's hard to tell the difference.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hugo winner Hurley's second futuristic novel (after The Stars Are Legion) is a smart, brutal, and structurally sophisticated military science fiction tale with a time travel twist. Infantry recruit Dietz is a "ghoul," someone who's denied access to basic social benefits provided by the squabbling megacorporations that dominate the solar system. After Martian separatists destroy her city, she enlists as a corporate military grunt. Dietz is broken down into light particles and beamed into combat zone after combat zone. But unlike her squadmates, she begins experiencing her combat drops and the entire war out of order. Hurley's time travel mechanics are intricate but never alienating, and they perfectly serve this story of "poor ageless grunts" caught in war's unending loop. Much of the drama comes from Dietz's growing disillusionment with the war, and her heartbreaking camaraderie with squadmates whose deaths she has already experienced. Like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, this book is both a gripping story of future warfare and an incisive antiwar fable. Readers will savor this striking novel's ambitious structure and critique of rapacious, militarized capitalism.
