Book #248 of 2019:
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
Another novel that hooks me on its premise but somewhat loses me in the execution. I love the idea of teleporting soldiers coming unstuck along their personal timelines, experiencing their combat missions all out of order. It’s a genre twist on the jumbled chronologies in classic works like Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22, with a similar implicit critique of the notion of sanity during wartime. And I like how those visions of the future reveal just how dishonest the commanding officers are being back in the past.
But the narrator doesn’t have much interiority, making it hard to know what she’s* thinking as she goes throughout this nonlinear war. And since her conversations with other characters are strained due to ever-present recording devices, any information we can pick up there is similarly oblique. I’d recommend this book for fans of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy who prioritize atmospheric paranoia over concrete evidence — or for readers who enjoy military sci-fi battle scenes and don’t mind whether a larger story makes sense or not — but anyone who values knowing exactly what’s happening in a narrative will probably be frustrated as I’ve been.
*Our protagonist is technically never referred to by gendered pronouns or given a physical description, but there are indications that she’s likely a woman, so that’s what I’ve adopted for this review.
[Content warning for suicide, torture, and gore.]
★★★☆☆
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