The Light Brigade

"The Light Brigade was the first science fiction book I read after taking a nearly ten-year hiatus from reading any fiction. I used to be in academia, and that meant I was reading for a job: I could not use my eyeballs anymore to read for pleasure. So I stopped reading. Then, when I failed out of it, I went through the Hugo nominees for the past couple of years. I read the blurb for The Light Brigade and thought, ‘Wow, this is a very unique concept.’ The premise of The Light Brigade is that Earth is at war with Mars, and instead of physically shipping soldiers, we are breaking them down into light, into photons, and we’re teleporting them to different locations. That was the speculative hook. The world-building hook was that instead of nations, we now have corporations, and for folks who want to have housing and health care, that is all tied to different corporations. I’m so glad that we currently exist in the timeline where I’m going to learn whether I’m team Amazon or team Tesla, when it comes down to it… Even though I read the novel in 2022, it felt very pertinent to the times. And it felt like a very new, very modern take on military sci fi. The cool thing that Light Brigade does is that there’s no gendered language for a long time in the book, and so you’re forming a relationship with the protagonist without knowing whether they’re male, female, non-binary, etc. By the time you realise, it doesn’t matter, because you’re already so invested in their story. And I think that is deliberate. The readership for military sci fi is generally male, and you don’t want to alienate anyone from the beginning, regressive as it may be to only read male protagonists. On a meta level, it also paints a very accurate picture of how the military as an institution erases a lot of individuality and personality, to the point where we no longer see the person for their gender identity, or their sexuality, or anything that makes them unique. We only see them as a soldier. That also plays very well with the corporate aspect of this world, where people no longer belong to themselves. They belong to these corporations. They’re products that can be traded, exchanged, etc. This was my reintroduction into contemporary science fiction. I didn’t know you could write like that, because I grew up on old school sci fi. This was a very large tonal shift and it made me think, ‘Oh, I can write like this. I can’t write like the old guys did in the ’60s, but I can write like this – if I get good, maybe, one day!’ I think there’s definitely a tonal shift happening. A lot of fiction coming out now that fits within the military side of the genre is highly critical of the institution of the military. It has to be. We can’t look at the current events and say that everything the military does is good and should be free from criticism. I think this is a very stark difference from the way that military sci fi was written earlier – I’m talking about the 60s and 70s – and I personally really like this direction change."

"Kameron is an author that has been previously nominated for the Clarke Award. She was one of the favourites for the year she was last nominated, for her novel God’s War , but the book that ultimately won that year was Ancillary Justice , which pretty much won every award going. A lot of people have said to me that, in another year with the same book, Kameron could have won the award very easily, so I’d definitely recommend checking that title out, too. Military science fiction is a hugely popular genre trope—the war with the evil empire, the machines, the bugs, et cetera et cetera—so on the one hand this book is absolutely embedded within the heartlands of the genre but, I can tell you now, Kameron has tricks aplenty up her authorial sleeve. The central science fictional concept here isn’t a new super-weapon, spaceship, super-soldier, implacable alien race or similar, but rather the means of delivering soldiers to the battlefield near-instantaneously as light transmissions, which is a fascinating twist of the ‘damn I wish I’d thought of that’ variety. It’s a fiendishly clever concept because it opens up all kinds of plotlines simply by following the logic of the technology embedded at its centre. What does it do to your humanity to be embedded suddenly into new warzones again and again? What if you’re transported to the wrong place, or you suspect you’re being sent to places other than the one detailed in your mission? People are talking about this book in the same way they do about absolute classic works of science fiction like Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein or The Forever War by Joe Haldeman , and like both those books the freedom of science fiction proves to be a very powerful tool for talking about contemporary issues around duty, patriotism and the dehumanising effects of conflict."