The fastest way to travel from one front to the next is to turn us into light.
Only two more novels left to read for this year’s Hugo Awards! This week’s review is for Kameron Hurley’s dystopian war novel, The Light Brigade.
We see the war through the eyes of Dietz, an idealistic young soldier…okay, actually a jaded and beaten-down teen. Dietz joined the army to avenge the destruction of homeland and family by the Martian forces who wiped out the entire city of São Paulo in an event known only as The Blink.
The soldiers are all told that this is a righteous war: heroic Earth forces against the invading Martians. But Earth society (run by six mega-corporations) is ugly and repressive, life in the army is brutal, and the teleportation process that breaks solders into particles of light and sends them instantly to the battlefield has a nasty habit of malfunctioning in gruesome ways.
Dietz might still have pushed through, trying to be a good little soldier and ignore the growing horrors, except a particularly interesting malfunction by the teleporter sheds a whole new light on the entire war.
A lot of people are comparing this book to Starship Troopers. And the very beginning at least really does feel like looking at Heinlein’s novel through a much darker lens. There’s still the same situation where joining the military is one of the only ways to gain citizenship. But for most of the people in Hurley’s version, not having citizenship means having nothing. No right to own property, no access to medical care, no legal jobs, just a lifetime of scrabbling for anything you can get and hoping that you don’t get disappeared by the authorities if you cross a line. Any line. Joining the armed forces is the best option when the government has nudged things just right to make it the only option.
Basic training also feels like a variation on what the Starship Troopers had to go through. Of course you need to get everyone to work together as a team; someone deciding to not follow orders in the middle of a battle could get themselves and everyone around them killed. Usually the fastest way to make this happen is to completely destroy someone’s idea of “self”, and here it’s done efficiently and relentlessly. Deprivation, punishment, exhaustion, “torture modules” (if you think a virtual torture session is automatically easier than a real-world one then you’d be wrong) and a constant stream of insults and criticism until, even though Dietz can see what’s happening and why, everyone falls into the exact same trap of wanting to do anything that would result in a “good job” from someone in charge.
This is how they break you.
And it works. Everyone more or less becomes an efficient unquestioning killing machine, and Dietz’s squad is picked for their first mission, sent to an empty field and turned into a beam of light to be dropped onto Mars…
…except Dietz corporealizes in the middle of a firefight in a banana grove on earth, surrounded by unfamiliar squadmates who’s reaction can be summed up as, “Shit, Dietz is doing that thing again.”
This is the point where The Light Brigade does its own thing. Dietz is constantly being teleported into completely unknown situations, desperately having to pretend everything’s fine, following the commands on the heads-up display, and hoping no one in charge realizes what’s going on and disappears yet another “problem” soldier.
The reader has no more of an idea what’s going on than Dietz does, you just have to hang on and plow through and hope it becomes clear later. It’s jarring. It’s bewildering. I lost track of days, of names, of which corporation was calling the shots and who was supposedly plotting against who. By the middle of the book I was completely lost.
And that’s the point. That’s the entire point. Looking at everything in sequence would be like the metaphor about the frog in slowly boiling water. Every propaganda trick in the book is used on the characters – both in and out of the military – all to convince them that it’s the other person, the other group, the other planetary race that’s the problem. If Dietz had been seeing things the way everyone else did then it wouldn’t have become obvious so quickly that something is very wrong with every single reason the soldiers have been given for why they’re fighting a war against the Martians in the first place.
But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs. Flood the world enough with information, and I will pick out only those bits that uphold the virtue and rightness of whatever corp I’ve been taught to love.
The dystopian setting is close enough to current day to keep things grounded, but far enough into the future for some stunning images (the moon was damaged in an attack prior to the start of the story, so there’s now a huge chunk missing, with a jagged ring of debris floating around it. I love that sort of thing.) The violence running through the story is almost never ending, small spaces of relative quiet followed by shocking moments of gunfire and soldiers going mad and civilians being slaughtered as soon as someone determines where they fall in the “us versus them” equation. The mishaps with the teleportation beams get progressively more and more horrifying, starting with someone reappearing with their arm sticking through their own chest and then, well, think of the worst thing you can imagine happening with a teleporter on Star Trek. Like that, only with more sound effects and blood. The author keeps you off balance by, among a lot of other things, making the description of what happens when someone is turned into a beam of light echo the description of what happens when someone is obliterated with a pulse rifle.
We burst apart.
The storytelling is so complex that the author literally had to use math and a spreadsheet to put all the pieces in the right order. Dietz has to watch someone die horrifically after one jump, only to arrive somewhere else to where they’re still alive while everyone is talking about a completely different mission that from Diezt’s point of view hasn’t even happened. Squad members will be worn and starving one minute, young and completely ignorant of the massacre just around the corner, and all it takes is one offhand question or a mark on the underside of a bunk bed to get one of those “oooh, crap” moments. There are a lot of those moments, as Dietz tries to figure out what’s going on, who’s really benefiting from the war, and how to make it stop.
Let’s make this very clear, this The Light Brigade is not anti-military. It’s anti-everyone who uses military for their own agenda, who convinces people to surrender themselves to a greater power and then points them at even the smallest threat to that power and says “kill”. This book came out last year, but Hurley has a lot of timely things to say about how resistance to a repressive government isn’t something that occasionally happens, it’s essential. “When you take away the ability of the people to effect change within the rules of the system, those people become desperate.” Damn right they do. And it’s something that has to get worse before it gets better. The more a government feels like it’s losing power, the harder it bears down on the idea that the other is the enemy, that group is the one trying to take your freedoms, they’re not patriotic like you, they’re not even human. And if they can convince you of that then they can take away some of your humanity too. Hurley has some interesting ways to show how Dietz, how all the soldiers, have been dehumanized.
Right up until the moment they decide they’re not.