Está bien que un autor nos muestre la parte humana de sus personajes (como defecar por ejemplo), pero lo que hace Hurley aquí es demostrar el fetiche que tiene con la mierda, la primera parte del libro es solo: mierda, cagar y vómitar. Y luego (cuando deja un poco la mierda a un lado) tenemos una historia repetitiva a cada capítulo, que cansa con la rutina de la protagonista, culminando en un final aburrido, flojo e inverosímil. ( )

Occasionally it felt like the ~message~ was slapping me in the face. But it's a well-thought-out time travel book with that eerie kind of spec fic feel that makes you uncomfortable. Also I probably read it too fast and won't remember any details in like, a week. ( )

In this dystopian SF novel Dietz is freshly recruited infantry soldier joining the fight on side of Earth corporations (Big Six) against aliens from Mars after MArtians manage to disappear entire Earth city.

To be clear aliens are not little grey men nor multi-limb creatures from nightmare. They are basically human colonists who gained independence from Earth Corporations and became the ultimate corpo-horror, socialists! with advanced technology

Due to the distances only way of transporting troops is by beaming them in form of light ray to the battlefield. And as one can imagine deconstructing someone into photons and then constructing them on the other end tends to have its bad-sides, not least of which is failure at re-construction of soldier on the far-away destination (if you remember that scene from Galaxy Quest movie then you know what I mean .... small technical glitch :)).

Very soon Dietz will find herself in very bad situation and if there is something corporate minds dont like is situations that cannot be fed to the masses. After unraveling details about what is going on Dietz will need to make capital decision on how to proceed and this might affect our entire world as we know it.

Story is fast paced and author manages very skillfully to navigate the non-linear story-line. Atmosphere is very palpable and brought to the reader in a very straight-to-the-matter-no-verbose way which is quite an achievement considering that in these situations authors sometimes overdo it and even invent entire new lingo. Corporations monitoring everyone by forcing them to use goggles and/or lenses so privacy is something you cannot have, social classes that are brutally divided in have and have-nots, harsh treating of soldiers and almost laboratory approach to treating their issues after multiple beam-ups, deadly confrontations with artillery and star-ships vaporizing everything in their path, constant lies and propaganda, cyberpunk-like inter-corporation conflicts.... in short this is very strong novel that relates to much of our own world today.

And final twist .... I can only say very sad but also very realistic approach to the problem.

Recommended to all fans of SF in general, military SF in particular. ( )

Let me just start by saying: The Light Brigade, the new standalone science fiction time-travel novel by Kameron Hurley, is a resounding triumph and already one of my top reads of 2020. I loved it so much, I can't wait to read it again.

The Light Brigade is in many ways the spiritual heir to Haldeman's The Forever War, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and Scalzi's The Old Man's War. The Light Brigade has a very modern tone, updated to our very real cultural moment of endless wars (think Iraq and Afghanistan) and corporate/media dominance and influence, xenophobia as well as our obsession with "fake news." It is also the spiritual heir to the works of PKD too, as The Light Brigade is quite the mind fuck as it juggles multiple timelines.

So what is it about?

Hurley’s future is a bleak one: six massive corporations run vast parts of society, controlling the media and privatizing services that their citizens have access to, provided they’ve signed extensive contracts. We’re introduced to Dietz, a young soldier who joins the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps in the aftermath of “The Blink,” an event that destroyed much of São Paulo (and Dietz's family among them) and has been blamed on colonists from Mars.

That mysterious incident sparks an intense war, and Dietz signs up out of a desire to find some meaning in her life and to avenge the 2 million people who were blinked away, not thinking about what signing up might cost her personally.

Based on a short story Hurley published in 2015, The Light Brigade roughly follows the formula that Heinlein came up with decades ago. We follow Dietz’s progress through basic training where, as in books like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, trainees are pushed until they break, and are then rebuilt to obey orders and fight for whatever values they’re told. Hurley’s soldiers have a bit of tech that Heinlein and Haldeman’s didn’t have: teleportation.

When called to active duty, Dietz (gender unspecified for most of the book, but you’ll figure it out fairly soon) experiences missions out of sequence with linear time, losing and regaining comrades, ordered to perform morally dubious actions which don’t seem to lead to victory, and gradually collecting information that strongly suggests that the enemy is not whom Dietz was told it was.

What is powerful about The Light Brigade is that Dietz is caught in a war that she can’t escape, but she has a unique vantage point; one that leads her to question the very nature of not only the war that she’s fighting, but of the entire society of which she’s a part. Dietz, with her unique way of experiencing the world, learns that her situation isn’t beyond her control, and that she has the power to change the state of the world.

Hurley's world is a feudalistic technological nightmare, where all citizens are defined by their host corporations. Freedom is an illusion. I once tried reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers and ended up throwing the book across the room because I couldn't shallow the idea implied that one has to earn their freedom through military service. While the world of The Light Brigade suggests freedom is an illusion (your essentially the property of a host corporation), Hurley does seem to suggest that free will does exist as Dietz learns that the key to her entire predicament comes down to taking control of her situation in order to save everyone.

The Light Brigade contains many homages to other sci-fi classics beyond just the above mentioned names. There is obviously a Star Trek influence. And there is a reference to Dune. With is to say: scifi nerds will love this book.

Read this if you enjoy challenging, thought-provoking and REVELANT military sci-fi that isn't afraid of a little body horror while challenging the status quo.




( )

This is an amazing story and really a huge what if/cautionary tale of how our future could turn out if we don't fix some things.

Sheer genius and I'd just learned that Cara Gee is the narrator for the audio book so now I'm going to absolutely have to listen to that. ( )