A Forever War: Kameron Hurley – The Light Brigade

It’s been a long time since I read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers but I remember being really impressed at the time. Now this book here is like an answer or maybe more a story in dialogue with the classic Heinlein novel. But then Kameron Hurley also adds multiple layers to her military science fiction story and tries her hardest to break her readers’ brains, in the best of ways. So in short: This was a pleasure and one of my top reads of the year so far!

THE LIGHT BRIGADE
by Kameron Hurley

Published by: Saga Press, 2019
Ebook: 368 pages
Standalone
My rating: 8,5/10

First line: They said the war would turn us into light.

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.

This story begins in the same spirit and with many nods to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Dietz, a young person joining the military to fight against Mars, goes through boot camp training. I will say right away that Dietz’s gender remains unknown throughout the novel. That was the first thing that caught my interest. With a platoon composed of all genders, I kept trying to guess whether Dietz was a man or a women or non-binary, only to find out soon enough that it really didn’t matter and had no impact on the story. So I let it go and simply let the story sweep me away.

The weeks of boot camp are as grueling as you’d expect. They are well written, made me cringe several times, and also do most of the groundwork for Hurley’s world building. We find out why this future version of Earth is at war with Mars. Mainly because Martians blew up part of the moon. And, oh yeah, they zipped a ton of people into nothing, leaving only devastation and grieving friends and family behind. So of course there has to be a war. This future is also not run by governments the way we know them, but by corporations (which, to be honest, isn’t much different from our governments but at least we keep up the pretense…). And people are far from equal. Much like in Heinlein’s story, in Kameron Hurley’s future, a person can earn citizenship through military service. Which would get you voting rights, access to better health care and so on – things any human being should have a right to, but it’s the future and it’s grim.

I have covered only the first few chapters of this book and you see that there’s already so much to discover! Once training is done, it’s time for Dietz to take on their first actual mission. In order to get to Mars – or wherever the next battle is supposed to happen – the soldiers are turned into atoms and sent there as beams of light. So far, so cool. Except Dietz’s very first drop is… weird. Everybody keeps telling them to stick to the mission brief but what if the mission brief is something completely different than the situation you currently find yourself in? It’s not a spoiler to say that this is exactly what happens to Dietz. Again and again. Dietz is sent on one mission, finds themselves somehow in the middle of a completely different one, returns home to find friends missing, is interrogated by a psychiatrist who also seems to know more than she lets on, and things generally don’t make any sense.

It is exactly this mystery that makes this book so enticing. Sure, the mission drops themselves are fun to read too, and they definitely help you figuring out the larger secret. These missions also make Dietz question more and more who they are really fighting against and for whom they are really fighting. If you like reading something that introduces a world only to turn it upside down, twist it around, and put it back together in a new way, then this is for you. I loved looking for snippets of information, for little hints here and there to find out what the hell was going on. I am also glad I didn’t figure it all out for myself (because that would be boring), but there are enough hints to at least point you in the right direction. For someone like me, who loves a good riddle or puzzle, this was enormous fun.

But that’s just the plot part of the book. There is yet more here hidden underneath the surface. While Dietz is almost the only character whose personality we really get to know – due to others dying during the war, disappearing, or simply not being prominent enough characters – Hurley paints a pretty clear picture of the world. Everything may be shit for most of Earth’s population, but apparently one’s sexual preferences aren’t interesting anymore. It is so refreshing to read a book where people can just be together or make out or have sex, no matter their gender identities. Dietz has sex with at least one man and one woman throughout this novel. There are married people in this book who sleep with people of a different gender than their marriage partner. Everyone seems to be just who they are, nobody seems to care, and it was just so damn nice to read about a world where that’s possible.

I won’t say any more about the plot because it really is worth discovering for yourselves. The ending, however, was amazing. All the puzzle pieces fall together, things from the very beginning of the book suddenly make sense and gain a significance you didn’t know they had. The interview scenes that are strewn between regular chapters also take on a different light. So although I am usually very focused on characters and this book really only had one well-developed character, I enjoyed this immensely and recommend it to everyone who can get their hands on a copy.

MY RATING: 8,5/10 – Damn excellent!