The Light Brigade
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4.2 • 22 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
NAMED BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AS A BEST BOOK OF 2019
From the Hugo Award–winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a brand-new science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars.
They said the war would turn us into light.
I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.
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 busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief—no matter what actually happens during combat.
Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.
Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero—or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference.
A worthy successor to classic stories like Downbelow Station, Starship Troopers, and The Forever War, The Light Brigade is award-winning author Kameron Hurley’s gritty time-bending take on the future of war.
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.
