The light brigade

Review by New York Times Review

THE LAST FEW YEARS have seen an uptick in pop culture stories featuring time travel, from the repetitions and revisions of "The Good Place" and "Russian Doll" to developments in "Game of Thrones," "Star Trek: Discovery" and "Avengers: Endgame." Sometimes the MacGuffin by which we get to play with anachronism, but often also rooted in questions of free will and determinism, time travel is a fascinating springboard for fiction: Are there many futures, or just one? Can you change the past without changing the future, or yourself? This column brings together books about time fractured and out of joint, time as an unbroken lineage resisting empire, and time travel glimpsed through the overlapping lenses of psychology, philosophy and physics. Kameran Hurley's THE LIGHT BRIGADE (Saga, $26.99) is based on her 2015 short story of the same name, fleshing out the high-concept skeleton of a story about soldiers who are literally broken into light in order to teleport them to different theaters of war. Dietz lives in a bleak future where Earth's climate has been devastated, Mars colonized and governments replaced by corporations whose mergers and acquisitions are supported by standing armies. When the city of Säo Paulo disappears in an event called the Blink - causing more than two million people, including Dietz's family and friends, to vanish instantly - Dietz decides to help fight those responsible: the Martians. Or so she's told. But as Dietz is incorporated into the Light Brigade, something goes wrong. Her "drops" start landing her in places she isn't meant to be, with a different platoon full of people she doesn't know, but who seem to know her. Every drop is disorienting, but eventually Dietz understands that she's experiencing the war out of order, jumping back and forth within her own experience of it every time she's turned into light. And with every drop, she gains new perspective on who's fighting whom, and at what cost. "The Light Brigade" is passionately brutal, fierce and furious in voice and pace. Everything's appropriately grueling, from Dietz's memories of life before she joined her corporation to her fractured experiences of battle, ft's a particularly cinematic experience of war, "Full Metal Jacket" meets "Edge of Tomorrow," close up in the muck and blood and horror, ft's genuinely moving, too: all these heartbreaking young people caught up in a sick lie that everyone half-knows but can't look at directly. It was difficult at times to situate myself in the timeline and significance of Dietz's drops, especially early on when the only distinctions in the exhausting homogeneity of warfare are the casts of characters making up different platoons. But I'm hard pressed to consider that a flaw instead of a strength, especially when grim idealism is so much a part of Hurley's brand. And this is, at its core, an idealistic book, hope lurking somewhere beneath the hurt. Arkady Martine's A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE (Tor, $25.99) is a mesmerizing debut, sharp as a knife that threatens as much by the gold filigree in its hilt as by the edge of its blade. Ambassador Mahit Dzmare - young, brilliant and lonely - has spent her life on Lsei Station enamored of the vast empire that borders it: Teixcalaan, a place of extravagant architecture and exquisite poetry celebrating, among other things, the empire's martial prowess. Lsei Station, by contrast, is austere and utilitarian, maintaining a tense independence from Teixcalaan partly through the careful machinations of the former ambassador Yskandr Aghavn. But Yskandr has mysteriously gone missing, and Mahit has been chosen to replace him, as much for her familiarity with Teixcalaanli language and literature as for her compatibility with Yskandr's "imago": a neural copy of him recorded 15 years earlier. Lsei Station survives in space through the secret technology of imago lines, grafting the memories, skills and personalities of the dead onto the living, integrating past and present into something new to take into Lsel's future. Mahit will carry a young Yskandr with her to help her navigate the City, Teixcalaan's capital. But when she arrives there, disaster strikes: When she learns Yskandr is dead, likely murdered, the Yskandr in her head shorts out in response, leaving her to sink or swim in the beautiful, implacable hostility of the Empire. "A Memory Called Empire" makes much of past and future selves, of memory and language and the things that can change them. One of the first questions Mahit asks her cultural liaison is, "How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of 'you'?" - a question that roots philosophy in grammar, makes manifest how language and custom are indissociable from the politics of conquest. With incredible clarity and precision, Martine folds layer after layer of complexity into this book, such that it, like Mahit, is a fusion of Lsei Station and Teixcalaan: welding beauty and efficiency, building engineering out of verse, ft left me utterly dazzled. Kate Mascarenhas's THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL (Crooked Lane, $26.99) is an equally astonishing debut, simultaneously a science fiction novel, historical drama, lockedroom murder mystery and magnificent meditation on how human beings experience and adapt to mortality. Time travel is invented in 1967 by four women in Britain, nicknamed "the pioneers," and with it come rules: ft's impossible to travel to a time before the invention of time travel, or to change the future. Because of that, time travelers - whose profession develops mundanely enough to merit its own curious tax treatment - can, in fact, travel into the past or future and speak to different versions of themselves, to family members whose deaths they experienced, to children who haven't been born yet. But not all the pioneers get to be time travelers: One of them, Barbara, breaks down during a television broadcast that's supposed to publicize their triumph, and Margaret, the unspoken, aristocratic leader of the group, manipulates the others into cutting Barbara out of the project for her own good. Consequently Barbara is the only one of the pioneers to live her life in a straight line, leaving time shenanigans behind - until one day in 2017, when her granddaughter Ruby receives a court document from the future describing the impossible murder of an elderly woman. Ruby becomes convinced it's about Barbara; meanwhile, in 2018, a woman named Odette stumbles across the murder scene. From there, the story unfurls through different points of view in a moving arabesque crossing generations. Without shirking the mechanics of how time travel works, the novel dwells at length in how time travel feels, both for those who hop back and forth through it and for those who experience it linearly, ft observes that trauma is a kind of time travel, inasmuch as one is compelled to reexperience the same event; and explores what happens to grief when your dead parent is still alive in a past to which you have unimpeded access. Mascarenhas offers us a world in which time travel has affected art at least as much as geopolitics, in which time travelers develop their own sealed and vicious culture, full of cruel hazing calculated to cut out their empathy in self-defense. This is also a novel in which the rich lives of women are given center stage - helping and hurting and falling in love with each other, being, more than anything else, significant to each other, as enemies or lovers. Breathtakingly tender and wryly understated, "The Psychology of Time Travel" feels like an antidote to a great deal of reported (and even fictionalized) history, its excised women now finding their way back into the spotlight. Ted Chiang's EXHALATION (Knopf, $25.95) collects nine deeply beautiful stories (two original to the collection, the rest published over the last 14 years), many of which explore the material consequences of various kinds of time travel. (Chiang's 2002 novella, "Story of Your Life," inspired the Oscar-nominated 2016 movie "Arrival.") From the purely determined universe of "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" to the parallel universes established with the push of a button in "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," these stories are carefully curated into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed extraordinary terrain. In fact, each individual tale feels like its own conversation, several of them centered on discussions between intelligent people with different opinions exploring a difficult subject together. The longest piece, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," is about people who invent childlike artificial intelligences called "digients" to sell as novelties - disconcertingly compared to pets throughout - and then refuse to give up the care of them when their popularity wanes and learning environments become obsolete. In addition to the patient clarity of the stories, there are notes to each one at the end of the book, adding an extra dimension to the collection; 1 loved learning the order in which the stories were written, how many of these notably contemporary-feeling pieces had their roots in discussions begun in the 1990s. Reading this book felt like being seated at dinner with a friend, one who will explain the state of the sciences to you without an ounce of condescension, making you a participant in the knowledge, ft is as generous as it is marvelous, and I'm left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it. AMAL EL-MOHTAR is a Hugo Award-winning writer and the author, with Max Gladstone, of "This Is How You Lose the Time War," forthcoming in July.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* 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 São 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.--Nell Keep Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hugo winner Hurley's second futuristic novel (after The Stars Are Legion) is a smart, brutal, and structurally sophisticated military science fiction tale with a time travel twist. Infantry recruit Dietz is a "ghoul," someone who's denied access to basic social benefits provided by the squabbling megacorporations that dominate the solar system. After Martian separatists destroy her city, she enlists as a corporate military grunt. Dietz is broken down into light particles and beamed into combat zone after combat zone. But unlike her squadmates, she begins experiencing her combat drops-and the entire war-out of order. Hurley's time travel mechanics are intricate but never alienating, and they perfectly serve this story of "poor ageless grunts" caught in war's unending loop. Much of the drama comes from Dietz's growing disillusionment with the war, and her heartbreaking camaraderie with squadmates whose deaths she has already experienced. Like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, this book is both a gripping story of future warfare and an incisive antiwar fable. Readers will savor this striking novel's ambitious structure and critique of rapacious, militarized capitalism. Agent: Hannah Bowman, Liza Dawson Assoc. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Dietz has joined the infantry to take revenge for the family and others lost at Sao 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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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 whereor whenthey 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 So 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Light Brigade 1. They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world. That's what I told the recruiter. That's what I told my first squad leader. It's what I told every CO, and there were . . . a couple. And that's what I'd tell myself, when I was alone in the dark, cut off from my platoon, the sky full of blistering red fire, too hot to send an evac unit, and a new kid was squealing and dying on the field. But it's not true. I signed up because of what they did to São Paulo. I signed up because of the Blink. All my heroes stayed on the path of light, no matter how dark it got. Even bleeding-heart socialist drones who play paladin can take an oath of vengeance to justify violence. I did. The enemy had eaten my family and the life I once knew; a past I now remember in jerky stutter-stops, like an old satellite image interrupted by a hurricane. I wanted to be the light: the savior, the hero, sure. But more than that, I wanted the enemy obliterated. How many other corporate soldiers signed up for money, or voting rights, or to clear a debt, or to afford good housing, or to qualify for a job in one of the big towers? I believed my reasons were nobler. When I signed up after São Paulo, me and my friends were shocked that the recruiting center wasn't packed. Where were all the patriots? Didn't they know what the aliens had done? I thought all those people who didn't sign up were cowards. While you were all upgrading your immersives and masturbating to some new game, we were fighting the real threat. We were the good guys. You were cowardly little shits. I didn't think about what would happen after I signed up. Or who I would need to become. I thought the world was simple: good guys and bad guys, citizens and ghouls, corporate patriots and socialist slaves. You were with us or against us. Pick your side. I was at a party not long after the Blink, drinking a jet-fuel tasting concoction out of a pulpy compostable bag, when a kid from my basic education class wandered over. I'd signed up with the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps with six friends, four of whom shipped out immediately. Me and the other two, Rubem Mujas and Andria Patel, managed to make the party. Rubem had gone inside, probably to pass out, leaving me and Andria on the lawn to answer everybody's questions. Andria was in high spirits. She didn't drink alcohol; her good cheer was all coltish excitement over our new career. "You get a signing bonus?" a snaggletoothed kid asked. "They give you citizenship on the spot?" "No," I said. Andria laughed outright. Pushed back the heavy cascade of her black curls. Freckles smeared the apples of her cheeks. I remember thinking she was thin, back then, leggy and athletic, but I hadn't seen what true starvation did to a person, not until later. "You have any other family but the ones they blitzed?" asked another girl. I knew her from basic physics class, one sponsored by Teslova Energy. "No," I said. "Be kind," Andria said. "The war has taken a lot from all of us. I look forward to bashing in alien heads." "I heard they'll teach you eighty ways to kill a man," the snaggle-toothed kid said, "when you get to Mendoza." "I don't want to kill men," I said. "I want to kill aliens." "I heard they were human once," the girl from physics said. "Bullshit," the other kid said. "No human would do what they did to São Paulo." "I guess I'll find out," I said. "They'll take away your name," said a tall guy coming over from under the balloon of the main party tent. "I bet that's the biggest advantage for a ghoul like you." I grimaced. Franklin Kowalski outweighed me by over twenty-five kilos and was almost two meters tall; I had to kink my head up to meet his look. He had beaten me out for first-string quarterback two years before. All the streams preferred faces like his, the coach said, and the corp could only justify an American football team if they kept their viewership up. I could play second string. I told the coach to fuck herself and played two years of rugby instead, until the Blink. I didn't like people telling me what I could do. Ironic, then, signing up for the goddamn military. "I hear they eat the rich in the corporate corps, Frankie," I said. "I'm sure you'll be delicious. Why wait to sign up?" "Already did," he said. He hooked his big thumbs in his pockets and gave a wry little smile, the one I knew preceded the word-vomit of some shitty-ass thing he'd just thought up. Andria rolled her eyes. "I'm going to check on Rube. He's probably vomiting into a messenger bag." She reached for my sleeve, but I stepped away from her. That was Andria--always looking after me. And me? Always self-destructive. "You know you'll have to fight the aliens," I said, before Frankie could get a word out, "not just fuck them." The snaggletoothed kid snickered. Andria made a moue and got very still. The girl from physics got all big-eyed and turned abruptly and marched back to the party tent. She was probably the smartest of us all. "Didn't they call your dad Mad Dietz?" Frankie said. "The one Teni had reeducated four times? I heard they sold him off to Evecom for stock options." "Go fuck yourself, Frankie," I said. He leaned over me, faster than I expected--I was a couple drinks in--and mashed his tongue against my cheek, leaving a long tail of gin-soaked saliva. I recoiled, so startled I froze. I'd think about that moment a lot, later. I'd wonder what I should have done immediately, instead of freezing like a dumb kid. In some other time line things went differently. I would have broken his nose, kicked out his kneecap--all in an instant. It's what a soldier would have done, what I would have done, later. But I didn't know anything about proper fighting--just the grappling we did on the field. I hadn't been conditioned for violence. I still had to be provoked. If I'd acted differently, I wouldn't be me. We wouldn't be here. He ducked away, laughing. "You keep dreaming about that, you little fucking grunt." Andria said, "Hey, leave it--" I leaped at Frankie in a full tackle. The smile fled. He went over. Yells from the crowd. Some cheers. Smell of grass and dirt and the chemical tang of fertilizer. Frankie slobbering, spitting at me. I shoved my elbow over his throat. "Yield," I said. "Fuck you," he said, and punched my temple. A flash of bright light. Darkness juddering across my vision. I swung, but he was already up on his hands and knees. I tackled him again and bit down hard on his left ear. He screamed and clawed my face. A hunk of his ear came away. I tasted coppery salt. Spit the chewy bit of flesh. Somebody grabbed me then, many hands pulling me away and dragging Frankie up. The world spun. The thump-thump of the music inside beat in time to the throbbing in my head. My face was wet. He'd busted my nose. The wet was blood. I bared my teeth. I spit up my blood and his. I raised a fist at the sky, blotting out the distorted specter of the moon. A great chunk of the moon was missing, had been for nearly a year. It still took some getting used to, that silhouette with the blinkering satellite of debris spinning around its equator. It had rained hellfire for weeks afterward, each shattered piece hurtling toward Earth like a nuclear warhead. "You keep your eye up there," I yelled at him. "That's where I'll come from when I kick your ass." "They only took you because you're a ghoul," Frankie said. "You'll be dead your first drop." The BLM--Business Loss Management squad--showed up, fit men and women wearing Kevlar and riot glasses, Tasers already out. They swarmed us from the mouth of the tent. Andria ran, probably to grab Rubem. She was already a good little citizen, and wasn't looking for trouble. I didn't blame her for ghosting. "Shame," said the woman who zip-tied my hands. She turned the recording feature on her riot glasses off. I winced. The glasses were meant to reassure us that the agents weren't using personal retinal displays to record encounters with us. Personal retinal displays were worn as external lenses in the eyes; they were almost impossible to detect unless actively streaming data across the eye. I'd been a ghoul long enough to know that a BLM agent turning off her external device was often prelude to a good beating--or outright death. She leaned over me and whispered, "Shame to get worked up with your whole future ahead, huh? You want to be a soldier?" BLM's all had face recognition built into their riot interfaces and a direct line to our files. She no doubt knew all the intimate details of my last relationship and where I took a shit this morning. I kept quiet. Never talk to the BLM unless they invoke the Corporate Disclosure clause in your residency contract. My mom had drilled that into my head after we became residents of Tene-Silvia. She and my father had worked their asses off to get us all attached to a corp, but it came with a whole new set of rules. Those rules were probably why I wasn't getting beaten up or murdered like I would have if this shit had gone down before then. "We need good kids up there," the BLM agent said. "You've gotta figure out what side you're on. Don't waste your life here, kid. The fight's on Mars." She turned her recorder back on. I wanted to be the hero who would have known exactly what to do when Frankie pulled his bullshit that night. The sort of kid who had a family to go back to, after that party, instead of a dorm for unaccompanied minors. The sort of kid who was driven by more than some dumb gory oath of vengeance. I didn't care if signing up killed me because I didn't understand what dying was, then. Be a hero, I thought. Get revenge. End of story. But that's not really living. I had no idea why living mattered at all, after the Blink. Not until the end. Excerpted from The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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