The Light Brigade reads like a decent space opera that’s desperate to be something more. I really wanted to like it, every reviewer I’ve seen compares it to Starship Troopers and the Forever War (the 2 titans of military scifi), but it’s just not in the same class. The main problem is that the actual events of the book and the core message and motivations just don’t line up. Every chapter ends with Hurley dumping platitudes that tell me how the characters feel rather than showing it through the events.
The best example of the book’s dissonance is in the first 50 pages. We start off in a future dystopia ruled over by Corporations. In the first chapter Dietz, the main character, gets into a bar fight and the police, who have facial recognition glasses, are implied to regularly beat people to death. Dietz decides to join up with the army and week 3 of bootcamp is literal torture. This reminds Dietz of a formative childhood memory, where she nurses a baby bird back to health only for her mother to eat it so she can make breast milk for her son, because they’re living in complete poverty and starving. They return home where Dietz house is raided, and her father dragged off to torture by a scientist lady who literally starts praising the Nazi’s. Not some implied fascist ideology, she literally starts talking about how the Nazi’s, from mid-20th Century Germany, where misunderstood. At the end of all of this we learn that Dietz joined the Corporation army, led by Nazi lady, to do good…
I just don’t believe the characters motivations. The setting is too dystopic, and the big platitude dumps too jarring. It’s disappointing because the bones of a great military science fiction are here. The main story revolves around these soldiers being ‘teleported’ to battles by a technology that turns them into light. However, being turned into light cause Dietz to jump around in time and she starts to realise she’s experiencing the war differently to her fellow soldiers. This is great stuff, and the concept of having different experiences of battle isn’t covered by any really big military sci-fi books yet.
Unfortunately, I think Hurley chose this light technology, not out of a love of scifi, but out of her love for light as a metaphor for good. I really hate this. It’s not that it’s a terrible metaphor, but if you need to wrap the central message of your book up in a metaphor you really just haven’t explained it well enough with real words. It happens at the end of almost every chapter, we’re told to ‘be light’ and that light gets rid of darkness. It’s hard to really slap someone in the face with a metaphor.
At one point in the book Dietz tells her therapist that she wants to be a Paladin. Fucking what? A paladin? I wanted to put the book down and shout at her, your own team keeps torturing you! She watches one of her commanding officers execute a handcuffed child in cold blood at one point and it still doesn’t click that she’s not with the good guys.
On a more positive note, I did enjoy the world building. The idea of this corporate dystopia, with the war against Mars and turning people into light is pretty fun. In the end we find out that they haven’t been going to Mars at all but they’ve been sent to fight other corporations on Earth and nothing is what it seems. It’s just a shame that Hurley hasn’t done a good job of making the events of her book push her core message. The writing itself is pretty alright, I liked the main character despite her obvious retardation, and it read quite quickly and well. I’ll definitely try out some of Hurley’s other books in the future, maybe something where she’s trying for space opera and only space opera.
Adam Loves SciFi 