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. 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.
It’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’s a particularly cinematic experience of war, “Full Metal Jacket” meets “Edge of Tomorrow,” close up in the muck and blood and horror. Everything’s appropriately grueling, from Dietz’s memories of life before she joined her corporation to her fractured experiences of battle. “The Light Brigade” is passionately brutal, fierce and furious in voice and pace. And with every drop, she gains new perspective on who’s fighting whom, and at what cost. 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. 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. Or so she’s told.īut as Dietz is incorporated into the Light Brigade, something goes wrong. When the city of São 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. Kameron 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.ĭietz 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. 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.
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