Nataliya's Reviews > The Light Brigade

“War was all about the annihilation of truth. Every good dictator and CEO knows that.”

Disclaimer: I am a card-carrying pacifist. I refuse to understand or accept any glorification or romanticization of war. War is hell, a meatgrinder of horror, and I firmly subscribe to the school of thought of “The worst peace is better than the best war”, as my mother often says.

So logically, I am usually not a big fan of military SF. I have to say straight up - I do not like the idea of strict military obedience and discipline. The idea of a boot camp meant to strip you of your own identity and remake you into a soldier meant to obey orders terrifies me. Achieving your goals through humiliation and denigration of a person is abhorrent. The rule of obedient aggression is a nightmare.

“I still believe in the military. I believe there’s sometimes a greater evil that must be vanquished. But more often than we’d like to admit, there is no greater evil, just an exchange of one set of oppressive horrors with another. Wars are for old people. For rich people. For people protected by the perpetuation of horrors on others.”

This book, however, is vastly different and nothing at all like what I was expecting. Far from glorification of war and aggression and violence, it is a strong critique of it, a fight against the eternal fight, the denouncement of neverending war. War is hell and little else, no glorification needed here. It ended up being a brutal uncompromising mindfuck, condemning not just war itself, but rampant capitalism and greed and conditional human rights. It ended up being a brutal read that I could not tear my eyes from.

“Don’t just fight the darkness. Bring the light.”
Or, as Sir Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”

“They said the war would turn us into light.”

————

Regardless of what you think of war, the search for justice and desire for vengeance and setting things right are powerful forces. Maybe you can’t help but see that in order to restore peace you need to break it first. Maybe you just need to be a hero, a paladin, a bringer of light, a sword (or a rifle) to fix up the fucked-up world when everything is terribly, bleakly *wrong*. When you are told that evil others destroyed not just your family but millions of innocent helpless others, you enlist. And you think you are doing what you must do, right?

But what if nothing is what it seems?

“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.”

The future is, as it is becoming customary in SF extrapolating from current trends, heavily and bleakly corporatized. You are either are a corporate “ghoul”, a nothing and nobody destined to scrounge for scraps in the gutter, or break your back trying to earn residency or citizenship in one of the Big Six mega-corps that can deign to bestow a semblance of rights to you, a crumb or two from the corporate table. Brutal, yes - but who else can fight those ‘alien Martian terrorist socialists’ if not our good free corporations, right? Right?

“You give a human being freedom and personhood as some innate right, and what do they have to fight for? Personhood is earned. Residency is earned. Citizenship is earned. If you’re not earning for the company, you are costing it.”

This book is from the start a sharp uncompromising critique of rampant capitalism run wild. The world is led by larger and larger corporations, the Big Six that become the Big Four and on, with CEOs at the helm and corporate profits being the religion. There are no countries, no governments, no accountability - just what’s handed down by the corps. It’s a throwback to feudalism, but corporatized.

“The corps take care of you, as long as you give them everything.”

“The corps were rich enough to provide for everyone. They chose not to, because the existence of places like the labor camps outside São Paulo ensured there was a life worse than the one they offered. If you gave people mashed protein cakes when their only other option was to eat horseshit, they would call you a hero and happily eat your tasteless mash. They would throw down their lives for you. Give up their souls.”

And once you rule every aspect of the employees lives, you are controlling the entire narrative of their reality. So what’s stopping the lies from shaping reality? And really, from out current vantage point it’s not too much of a stretch to see how we can get there.

“There was a time when human beings believed they were their governments. They understood they had power over them, because they created them. They did not simply wait around for their governments to give them rights and freedoms. They demanded them. People should not be afraid of the corporations. Corporations should be afraid of the people.”

Dietz, a former “ghoul” whose father was “disappeared” by her corporation, nevertheless joins the Earth-Mars war on the side of that corporation, driven by the need to avenge the millions that those evil Martians have wiped out in the Blink, the disappearance of her home city and her family. She buys the party line that the corporation sells - after all, abhorrent as the corporations are, they still are supposed to be the good guys in this bleak endless war - the war where Earth has a slight advantage of being able to literally break the soldiers into light and beam them at the speed of that light to where the battles are. And any war needs soldiers. And so Dietz enlists, answering the call to arms, fueled by righteous anger and desire to be on the good side - the determination that lets her survive the dehumanizing and brutal boot camp and prepare her for her new role as a grunt in the war. Because some horrors can only be answered with violence. Right? Right?

“Let me tell you how they break you.
You are shit. Everything you do is shit. From the minute you step off the transport at the training base in Mendoza, you aren’t doing anything right. You don’t walk right. Look right. Talk right. You are a bag of human excrement. No one likes you, let alone loves you. In great shape? It’s not enough. Smart? That’s worse. Nothing is ever good enough for the Corporate Corps. They want blind obedience.
After a week of that, you’re hungry for anything. Hungry for a “That’s right,” or a “Good job.” You want love, acceptance. Humans want connection. I thought that was bullshit until mandatory training. I didn’t believe we were all bags of meat propelled by emotion, but I was wrong. The DIs know. They know exactly what we are, and how to play us.
That’s how they teach you to kill.”

Things go wrong for Dietz pretty quickly - right on her first military “drop”. Dietz, like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, basically gets unstuck in time. On the very first drop and thereafter, it’s the same - surfacing in the wrong place, wrong squad, wrong time - but only in the war, the neverending massacre, with no end in sight. And it’s not easy. There are rumors of the Light Brigade - those like Dietz who experience this war out of order, but if you want to survive and not be disappeared, you gotta keep your mouth shut and “stick to the brief”.

“You think you can change what happens, if you know what I know? Let me tell you something. Everything that’s going to happen has already happened. You just haven’t experienced it yet. We are, all of us, caught within a massive loop of time, bouncing around in the spaces between things.”

It gets confusing and overwhelming and frustrating as hell. Dark and gritty and gruesome and extremely compelling. And visceral. Like a punch into - or, in Hurley’s writing style, through - the guts.

“What I learned, as I looked back on those times, was that the lies are what sustained us. The lies kept us going. Gave us hope. Without lies we have to face the truth long before we are ready for it.
Long before we are prepared to fight it.”

And, thanks to experiencing the war out of order, Dietz realizes that everyone has been living a lie. Nothing is what it was supposed to be. There is just a struggle for control, the corporation greed, and an endless war to utter destruction without a future. There are a select few who benefit from the labor of the millions and billions working themselves to death for crumbs from the rich ones tables while deluding themselves that they are free - free to choose mindless toil, free to break their backs, free to die - for enrichment of those at the top of the corporate ladder.

“Believing lies just makes everything ... easier, when those lies prop up your worldview.”

“Who were we really fighting?
They don’t like us to ask questions. They try to train it out of you, not just if you’re a corporate soldier, but for citizens and residents, too. The corp knows best, right?”

“People would believe whatever you put in front of them, if it fit their understanding of the world.”

And eventually questions must be asked and answered. Why do you fight? Who are you fighting for? Who are you even fighting? And most importantly, how can the fighting end?

“That’s the war I knew. The events as I understood them. That’s how I decided which side of the war to be on. And I was. On the right side, I mean.
Nobody ever thinks they chose the wrong side.
We all think we’re made of light.”

And it all becomes a mindfuck. A brutal, cruel, political, angry, unsubtle and yet very relatable mindfuck. With no area for the gray zones. Intensely political, with not even a suggestion - praise all the higher powers - of the aggression “porn” that one could expect from military SF. With no confusion about how dangerous it is to “stick to the brief”. Maybe a bit simplistic, yes, but that may be exactly what makes it so brutally effective at beaming its message through.

“This is something we don’t talk about . . . what happens when you are presented with a truth that contradicts everything you believe in?”

“But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs.”

In this book of brutality and destruction and politics and disjointed time-travel narration there is nevertheless a shining humane thread - the relationships that Dietz manages to form through her confusing disjointed years in the senseless meatgrinder of neverending war. Friends and comrades, some of whom (because of disjointed time jumps in her life) she sees violently die before she eventually meets them somewhere else in the timeline, forging the bonds that she knows will be severed soon - but that doesn’t make them less real or less poignant. The camaraderie, the cohesive glue of the weight of shared horrors, the surrogate chosen family they become for their squadmates keep the semblance of sanity as all the illusions are shattered and hopes come crashing down. The interpersonal connections are the heart of the book and the shining beacons of light in this hellish nightmare of the war.

(view spoiler)[ “All of us dead, and for what? So the corps could consolidate power. One corp to rule them all.” (hide spoiler)]

It’s a strongly written book. It’s clever and consistent, and despite the grim nature, very engrossing. I’m frequently wary of war/battle scenes in books as they are frequently either dull or hard to follow, but here the action is done well, not detracting from the story but organically weaving it into the development of characters and settings.

And despite the dark grim brutality, this book hinges on hope. Hope that the loop of violence can be broken. Hope that the mindless corporate greed can be overcome. Hope that when a new war rally call inevitably comes, it will not be answered.

And this hope deserves its 4+ stars from this committed pacifist over here.

“This is not the end. There are other worlds. Other stars. Other futures. Maybe we’ll do better out there. Maybe when they have a war again, no one will come.
Maybe they will be full of light.”

———————

My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...