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

Here's another WOW title. I've enjoyed Kameron Hurley's other novels quite a lot but nothing prepared me for this one.

It's the spiritual grandson (or grandaughter) of Haldeman's The Forever War and Heinlein's Starship Troopers. It has a little of both and a lot of the very modern tone, updated to our very real cultural relativity wrapped up in a very hardcore DUTY wrapping while never quite knowing what is really real. In that respect, it's a bit of PKD, too.

And I love it.

Getting turned into light to fight on Mars in a neverending war is the signature of futility in a fantastic hard-SF bow.

For those of you who are big fans of Hurley's other hard-SF trilogy, it deals with the same issues of torture, being ground down to nothing, and working through the lies, lies, lies surrounding them.

The big bad is never all that clear. We're told it's Mars but while everyone is kept in the dark and strange time-hopping things happen out of sequence and big horrors keep turning their lives into a patchwork, we're given a very special look at the real enemy. Could it be ourselves? :)

Back into the meat grinder, men!

Just... wow. I think Hurley's writing is getting even better. I'm such a fan of this novel that I want to see it get nommed for Hugo.

That's three for this year so far! Really great SF, folks. :)



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