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The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
Apr. 6th, 2019 05:20 pmThe Light Brigade
3/5. In a future where corporations have replaced governments, a teenager joins the military to fight in the war against the "aliens" on Mars. This involves speed-of-light travel, which unintentionally sends a few people, including our protagonist, bouncing back and forth along their timeline, experiencing the war completely out of order.
I'm a sucker for time travel, and the ¾ of this book which is nonlinear scratches that itch. But I didn't otherwise like it as much as a lot of the early reviewers. Yeah, maybe it's the relentless brutality and Hurley's compulsive addiction to body horror (I mean, we've all got our writerly things, but jeeeeeeesus). Maybe it's that this book is in conversation with a lot of classic texts – scifi and not – that I either don't like or have never read. Maybe it's the deeply unsubtle anti-capitalist messaging. I mean, I respect the need to scream about these things, which this book does, but that was a lot of screaming with absolutely no subtlety or complexity – there's even speechifying -- and now I have a bit of a headache.
I do like the approach to time travel here. Paradoxes exist, and loops, and different endings depending on whose point-of-view you consult. But can someone explain the ending to me? Specifically, we spent all this time establishing the possibility of paradox and breaking out of a loop, and then ( spoilers ).
I think it explains this book to say that there are two halves of this story: there's a brutalist nonlinear war half about a person embedded in a system that commands her to perform a series of atrocities, and there's a mostly linear half about a person learning to deprogram herself and get rid of a lot of toxic political baggage. And this book totally skips that second half because that's just not what it's interested in, even though it does want the fruits of that character development.
I dunno, I think I'm realizing that I like Hurley's commentary – her blog and podcast are great – but her fiction is really not for me.
Content notes: Everything. Often twice. With extra bodily fluids and death. Oh, except rape. Refreshingly none of that.
3/5. In a future where corporations have replaced governments, a teenager joins the military to fight in the war against the "aliens" on Mars. This involves speed-of-light travel, which unintentionally sends a few people, including our protagonist, bouncing back and forth along their timeline, experiencing the war completely out of order.
I'm a sucker for time travel, and the ¾ of this book which is nonlinear scratches that itch. But I didn't otherwise like it as much as a lot of the early reviewers. Yeah, maybe it's the relentless brutality and Hurley's compulsive addiction to body horror (I mean, we've all got our writerly things, but jeeeeeeesus). Maybe it's that this book is in conversation with a lot of classic texts – scifi and not – that I either don't like or have never read. Maybe it's the deeply unsubtle anti-capitalist messaging. I mean, I respect the need to scream about these things, which this book does, but that was a lot of screaming with absolutely no subtlety or complexity – there's even speechifying -- and now I have a bit of a headache.
I do like the approach to time travel here. Paradoxes exist, and loops, and different endings depending on whose point-of-view you consult. But can someone explain the ending to me? Specifically, we spent all this time establishing the possibility of paradox and breaking out of a loop, and then ( spoilers ).
I think it explains this book to say that there are two halves of this story: there's a brutalist nonlinear war half about a person embedded in a system that commands her to perform a series of atrocities, and there's a mostly linear half about a person learning to deprogram herself and get rid of a lot of toxic political baggage. And this book totally skips that second half because that's just not what it's interested in, even though it does want the fruits of that character development.
I dunno, I think I'm realizing that I like Hurley's commentary – her blog and podcast are great – but her fiction is really not for me.
Content notes: Everything. Often twice. With extra bodily fluids and death. Oh, except rape. Refreshingly none of that.
