Review: The Light Brigade

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read this book as part of voting for the Hugo Awards this year. This book was in the last place on my ballot, three after "No Award". A 2.5-star DNF review reflects my experience with this book.

Dietz is a soldier in a future army. She enters the service in part to obtain citizenship; with all of the rights that go along with citizenship. There are three levels of existence; citizenship, legal resident, and just living. Where you sit in that pecking order determines the resources available to you.

The army she serves is fighting an enemy on Mars. But it is expensive to move soldiers into space and then to another planet. It's also hard to launch a surprise attack.

The scientists have discovered a way to convert soldiers into electromagnetic energy (i.e. light) so that the soldiers can be transmitted to the battlefield at the speed of light. There are a couple of problems with that theory presented in the book. The first is that being converted from matter to light and back tends to cause a sort of mental psychosis and physical deformities (think of the worst Star Trek transporter accident). Numerous trips increase the odds of something weird (and probably lethal) happening in transit. For Dietz, the problem is that she has stopped experiencing linear time. Her unit launches with a brief for one mission and she ends up on a different one; one she should remember, but doesn't, or one from the future that she also doesn't remember but is definitely out of linear order.

The second problem is that she never seems to land on Mars; the battlefields are always on Earth. The Martians that she and her unit fight are actually descendants of the humans that emigrated to Mars who have returned to restore the (nuclear?) wasteland of Canada. They are communists.

On the positive side, the book presents the interpersonal relationships of military service almost perfectly. Those characters and there relationships with one another were very believable. Coupled with the mystery of experiencing the non-linear passage of time, this book is a fine read as long as you aren't willing to take any of the rest of it seriously.

The author's lack of familiarity with actual military service is revealed early on. The characters take part in "marksmanship" training during boot camp that involves using bayonets on dummies. Marksmanship training involves shooting bullets. Bayonet training falls under "close combat training". There is also a boot camp sequence where the recruits go on an extended survival march after only 2 weeks worth of physical training and no survival or combat training.

The author uses the word "corps". In a military sense, the "s" is silent and describes a defined unit within the military. The author intends the word to be short for corporations; sounds like "corpse". That is a confusing use of the term within a MilSF context.

At one point, the author is describing "fire teams" and "squads". There are references to a commanding officer. What is never clear is how units break down (i.e. how many fire teams to a squad, squads in a platoon, etc.) nor is it ever clear how many soldiers report to a given CO. It is inferred that a platoon commander is a commanding officer. Nope.

One of the soldiers ends up being wounded. Another soldier opens up their own med-kit and begins rendering aid. It is the standard doctrine that you always, always, always use the wounded soldier's med-kit before touching your own.

One character, Major General Stakely, is referred to as Major Stakely. Nope. That should be either "General Stakely" or "Major General Stakely". Otherwise, you are demoting the character by four levels.

There are more examples, but the point is made. The author's familiarity with military structures and traditions is nearly non-existent.

[Please permit a brief pause. I hate the idea of "sensitivity readers". I think authors should be free to explore cultures and experiences that may beyond their remit. I do think that authors should pursue sufficient information to lend accuracy to their work. "Accuracy readers" are a great idea as they help the author understand where they are bending reality and where they are breaking reality. Sometimes a purposeful breaking of reality is justified. This book could have used an accuracy reader so that the author would know what they were breaking.]

This book seems to be an attempt at a conversation with Robert Heinlein and his book Starship Troopers, among others. It is woefully inadequate for that task.

In Heinlein's books, the people leaving earth are always described as seeking relief from an ever intrusive amount of government. They always use their newfound freedom to innovate in ways that the legally sclerotic Earth governments always regulated against. In Heinlein's works, success was always presented as the first fruit of individual liberty.

This has been the story of humanity throughout recorded history. Heinlein wasn't making something up. He was echoing human experience.

In contrast, the author has the Communists leaving earth for Mars where they develop the technology needed to restore a North American continent that has been ravaged by war. I believe nuclear weapons are implied, but the devastation is on that scale nonetheless.

The problem is that human history relative to Communism documents that it causes oppression and poverty. It slows technological advancements and stifles human knowledge. That which the party disapproves is simply a topic that will never be explored regardless of the potential benefits. That which the party approves is enacted regardless of the demonstrable harm.

Any author suggesting that Communism has (finally!) worked is automatically obligated to demonstrate how it worked. In light of the unbroken series of failures that have led to mass poverty (at the very least) and mass graves (over 100,000,000 killed), the suggestion that Communism is a functioning political and economic model places a heavy burden on the author to demonstrate how it works. Within the context of the first 2/3s of the book, this is just hand-waved away. How an intellectually backward political and economic system of governance with a demonstrable history of creating poverty and oppression is able to develop a new technology that is unavailable on Earth stretches the suspension of disbelief well beyond the breaking point.

There is also the sub-text of a limited set of corporations running the world. Anyone familiar with the 1970s vintage movie "Rollerball" will have already experienced a far more effective treatment of that unlikely outcome. Within the course of human histories, corporate monopolies rarely last without a government mandate.

This is a decent book if you aren't going to think about the themes and the details too much. The characters are quite engaging. The plot involving a non-linear procession of time is intriguing.

But after reading ~2/3s of the book, I knew that it was going well below No Award on my Hugo ballot. I knew that the author was just splashing militarium (well-crafted militarium, but a splashing of it nonetheless) around without really understanding anything about military training and operations. And I knew that the political/economic theme was going to be a hot mess. This was a DNF read for me.

Reading this book put me in the mind of a quote by author Jim Butcher: "Never preach harder than you can entertain." When the sub-text supersedes the text, an author has shifted from story-telling to preaching. Butcher's aphorism applies in spades.

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My reviews of all of the 2020 Hugo finalists for best novel are here.