Books › The Light Brigade
The Light Brigade
408 pages
A gritty, time-fractured military thriller that weaponizes memory against a backdrop of brutal corporate warfare.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being dropped into a meat grinder of corporate greed and temporal distortion. It is a fiercely propulsive, adrenaline-fueled experience that deliberately disorients you, mirroring the protagonist's fractured reality as they are broken down into light and beamed across interplanetary battlefields. The atmosphere is soaked in paranoia and the grim grime of the trenches, stripping away any romanticized illusions of heroism to expose the bleak machinery of war. Yet, beneath the visceral combat and cynical tone lies a deeply compelling anti-capitalist heartbeat. It will absolutely devour readers who love gritty, mind-bending military science fiction that challenges the mind as much as it races the pulse, leaving you questioning the very nature of the reality you've just witnessed.
- Mood
- disorienting
- paranoid
- bleak
- adrenaline-fueled
- Tone
- cynical
- gritty
- anti-authoritarian
- intense
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- corporate exploitation · trauma of war · unreliable memory · anti-capitalism · illusion of heroism
- The writing
- Sharp, visceral, and relentlessly paced, the writing mirrors the protagonist's fractured, time-skipping reality.
- The arc
- The journey shifts from naive, revenge-driven patriotism to profound disillusionment and ultimately, a radical, reality-altering rebellion.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave gritty, anti-capitalist military sci-fi with complex, non-linear narratives and a fiercely questioning spirit.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- war trauma
- gore
- psychological manipulation
- corporate dystopia
About the book
From the Hugo Award–winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a brand-new science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars.
They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.
The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back...different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief—no matter what actually happens during combat.
Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.
Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero—or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference.
A worthy successor to classic stories like Downbelow Station, Starship Troopers, and The Forever War, The Light Brigade is award-winning author Kameron Hurley’s gritty time-bending take on the future of war.
Description from Open Library.
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