I remember when Kameron Hurley’s debut novel, God’s War (2011, USA), first appeared. Niall Harrison — whose critical writings were recently collected in All These Worlds (2023, UK); it is recommended — championed the book on social media. The author’s name was unknown to me, but the Islam-based setting intrigued and Harrison is a voice to trust. I loved the book, so much so I bought the two sequels, even though the trilogy was published by a US imprint. (It was published in the UK a year or so later.)
Hurley was plainly a new voice to watch. Her next novel was The Mirror Empire (2014, USA), the first of a fantasy trilogy, the Worldbreaker Saga. I bounced off it. Hard. These things happen.
A couple of years ago, her follow-up to the fantasy trilogy, a standalone science fiction novel, The Stars are Legion (2017, USA), was on offer as an ebook. I bought it, thinking it had been a Clarke Award nominee. But that was a later novel by Hurley. The Stars are Legion was good, very good in fact. Which made me want to read the Clarke-nominated novel, The Light Brigade (2019, USA), even more.
This is a novel so much in conversation with the science fiction genre, it’s hard to know where to begin. It is, obviously, a response, or a pendant, to Robert A Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959, USA) and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974, USA). It directly references those two books; it even references Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film adaptation (which is a better sf movie than the original novel is a sf novel). And those are not the only Easter eggs buried in the text.
The narrator of The Light Brigade is Dietz, who is Brazilian. In the future of the novel, the world is run by six global corporations, after a nuclear war which turned North America into a radioactive wasteland. Much of this history is revealed in a somewhat inelegant info-dump. Dietz’s parents were not citizens — as in Heinlein’s novel, citizenship is not a birthright — and when breakaway Martian colonists, othered as “aliens”, cause two million people in São Paulo to disappear in an instant, the Blink, the corporations declare war against Mars. Dietz signs up as a soldier.
So far, so formula. But The Light Brigade’s twist, a riff on The Forever War’s lightspeed time-dilation, is that the soldiers are converted into light, and then beamed to the battlefield, whether on Earth or on Mars.
But Dietz’s military career does not go as expected. Every time she is sent on a “drop”, she finds herself on a different mission to the one she was briefed about. She soon figures out she is being bounced backwards and forwards in time, giving her a unique perspective on the war. Since the narrative of The Light Brigade is told from Dietz’s point of view, we learn about the progression of the war as she does. Her fellow soldiers and officers, however, eventually realise Dietz provides a window on the future.
Which is bleak. Very bleak.
The entire war was faked. The corporations are fighting each other for dominance. There may have been Martians at one point, but they were never really a threat to the corporations; but someone had to be blamed when corporations began attacking each other on Mars. Hurley has taken the near-fascist setting of Starship Troopers, and not only created a world that is plainly fascist, but also a narrative that interrogates its own fascist setting — there’s even a nod to the “Are we the bad guys?” meme.
Heinlein presented his background without commentary, assuming most readers would understand it was a thought experiment. Sadly, many didn’t. There were a few hints in the novel, such as the scene with the recruiting sergeant — which Hurley directly references in The Light Brigade. But where Heinlein left his readers to make up their own mind, Hurley deconstructs Heinlein’s setting.
Dietz is from the lowest levels of society, and Hurley feeds the reader plenty of flashbacks to illustrate it. The benefits of corporate citizenship are explained, and they do not compare well with those of most current Western democracies (although perhaps not the US). But Dietz’s journey through the war — soldiers who bounce back and forth through time are known as “the light brigade” , hence the novel’s title— inspires her to find a way to prevent the war from happening. The world in which she grew up, and then turned soldier, can be changed.
Perhaps the twist at the heart of The Light Brigade is not that much of a surprise. Smart readers will likely have guessed it. But the journey to that point in the narrative is far from predictable — and narratives that jump back and forth in time are bitches to write and keep consistent… but Hurley manages it.
However, I think, on reflection, the most impressive aspect of The Light Brigade, more so than its expert plotting, is how peppered is the text with references and Easter eggs and callbacks to related works from the science fiction corpus. Missing them doesn’t spoil the reading experience — I probably missed plenty, and I considered myself well-read in the genre — but they definitely add to it. The Light Brigade offers zings, to coin a word, from the plot and from the references.
The Light Brigade was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, but lost out to Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019, Zambia), which is an historical novel with only a tenuous connection to science fiction— although I did think it a very good book. As for the rest of that year’s shortlist… The Last Astronaut (2019, USA) by David Wellington was shit, actually really quite bad. The Cage of Souls (2019, UK), Adrian Tchaikovsky, and The City in the Middle of the Night (2019, USA), Charlie Jane Anders, were readable but unremarkable. And Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire (2019, USA), which had some excellent world-building, sadly promised more than it delivered.
The Old Drift was a good winner, but The Light Brigade was definitely a close contender.
