The Light Brigade

February 1, 2019

Dietz has joined the infantry to take revenge for the family and others lost at São Paulo. She's fighting for Tene-Silvia, one of the Big Six corporations battling against Mars. To fight so far away, soldiers are broken down into light to travel, corporealize at the battlefronts, and collected back afterward. Everyone changes in war, but Dietz is experiencing bad combat drops that show missions and fights different from what was briefed. As Dietz struggles to stay committed to the effort and fellow platoon members, her memories tell a story very much removed from the one she started with. VERDICT Hurley's (The Stars Are Legion) take on war and interplanetary adventure is mixed with a vigorous helping of time travel, which will have readers trying to catch up with the truth as much as the lead character. An absorbing and gritty story from this accomplished author.--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2019
Like Billy Pilgrim from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Hurley's protagonist, Dietz, becomes "unstuck in time," bouncing from battle to battle in this brutal futuristic exploration into the meaninglessness of war and the legacies of corporate greed.This book is full of such deliberate cultural references, beginning with the title's allusion to the famously doomed charge during the Crimean War. Here, it's also a nickname for the soldiers of the Corporate Corps who have a bad reaction to their deployments via teleportation, ending up not quite where--or when--they expected to go. Despite being neglected or abused by the corporations that run the devastated Earth, Dietz joined the corps (and unwittingly, the Light Brigade) in the war against Mars after that planet's independent settlers apparently made millions of people disappear from São Paolo, all of Dietz's family among them. 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. Does the war have an end? Is the future predetermined? Is Dietz trapped in a fixed but fractured loop of existence, or is there a means of escape? As always, Hurley (Apocalypse Nyx, 2018, etc.) is plausibly unflinching about the damage inflicted by the power hungry on those they delegate to carry out their schemes, but thankfully, she doesn't leave her readers in utter despair, either.A fascinating and brilliantly confusing journey that ultimately ends, as is appropriate, in illumination. Rereads will be both necessary and desirable.

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Starred review from January 1, 2019
Hurley's latest (after Apocalypse Nyx, 2018) presents a future in which the government consists of six massive corporations and society is divided into corporate citizens and dispossessed, status-less "ghouls." The Six and their private armies are waging a war against the colonists of Mars after the Martians reportedly made the entire population of S�o Paulo disappear in "the Blink." To transport their soldiers in and out of combat, the Six use an experimental technology to break down their bodies into light and rematerialize them at their destination. Dietz, a soldier and former ghoul whose family and ex-girlfriend disappeared in the Blink, is eager to become part of the war effort. On her first drop, however, she starts experiencing events and history seemingly out of order, going on missions she's never heard of with soldiers she's never even met. Mixing a gritty and muscular writing style with an intricate and time-hopping plot with echoes of Philip K. Dick's Now Wait for Last Year, The Light Brigade is an enthralling portrait of a devastated near future. Highly recommended for not only sf fans but anyone interested in a thrilling and troubling vision of the future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)