#Kameron hurley the light brigade skin#

Here, the democratic message is contradicted by the use of a quasi-divine power. It finally allows the emergence of a deus ex machina to counter the seemingly absolute and inexorable power of the corporations. The notion of a (partially) constructed reality, which is justified by a rapid allusion to quantum physics, and of a technological means for manipulating it, quickly becomes indistinguishable from magic. From this point of view, we go beyond the epistemological level of subjective uncertainty towards the ontological level of construction of the real.

The link with NINEFOX GAMBIT can be seen in the fight for the control of the calendar (the soldiers are kept in total ignorance of the day, the date, and even the year) by the ruling power, in an attempt to control the potentially “exotic” effects of the teleportation technology and to take advantage of it in the conduct of the war. Hurley avoids the structural problem of NINEFOX GAMBIT whose democratic message is contradicted by his narrative fixation on the acts of the elites.ĬALENDRICAL CONTROL AND QUANTUM UNCERTAINTY E ven if we only know the characters through fragmentary sketches (justified by the narrator’s unstuckness in time), we see mostly ordinary soldiers. The reader, like the narrator, reduced to a pointillist depiction, must construct their image of people through scrambled snippets of information and perception.ĭespite all this dispersion, the reader succeeds in constructing a synthetic image of the main characters, such as Munoz, Andria, Tanaka, Jones, Norberg. This uncertainty and fragmentation at the level of perception and information also affect the novel’s characterization. These processes (chronological scrambling, temporal ungluing, kaleidoscopic perception) are well combined with the need for the inhabitants of the Earth (divided into citizens, residents, and “ghouls”) to maintain a critical, even paranoid, consciousness in a world where censorship and fake news rule. PARANOID CONSCIOUSNESS AND POST-TRUTH POLITICS The narrative is blurred chronologically, not arbitrarily or as a literary technique, but in the image of the main character’s “unstuck in time” experience, creating a kaleidoscopic perception of the world, the war, and other characters. My feeling reading THE LIGHT BRIGADE was that it very successfully accomplished the task of the transposition of the canonical genre of the military science fiction novel into a more contemporary political, epistemological, and ontological context.

KALEIDOSCOPIC PERCEPTION AND TRANSPOSING THE CANON Just as i n the eyes of the corporations we are all pawns, in Dietz’s eyes the gender of a friend or enemy is of only secondary importance.

This indifference of gender is no longer in the foreground, as is the case in ANCILLARY JUSTICE, but remains in the background, as a trivial given of the situation, not a foregrounded pedagogical gimmick. We only learn the gender of the main character, our narrator, late in the book.

#Kameron hurley the light brigade skin#

The question, or rather the non-question, of gender is treated more satisfactorily in THE LIGHT BRIGADE than in these recent novels, much as the question of the color of the skin in STARSHIP TROOPERS is handled seemingly casually.

The dialogue is also engaged with contemporary novels, for example with ANCILLARY JUSTICE (Ann Leckie) and NINEFOX GAMBIT (Yoon Ha Lee). Multiple allusions to the great novels of military SF (STARSHIP TROOPERS, THE FOREVER WAR, OLD MAN’S WAR, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE) add depth and thematic density to the narrative, and we quickly understand that we are immersed in a new contribution to a great intertextual conversation.

Despite the stereotyped narrative line where the protagonist, Dietz, passes from the state of “rookie” to that of hero, the narration is non-linear as Dietz becomes “unstuck ” in time, and we have to piece together both the war and the characters from the scrambled order of presentation. The story and the characterisation are well handled. The basic frame of a war between the Earth under the sway of totalitarian corporations and its former colony on Mars is well conducted and interesting in itself. THE LIGHT BRIGADE by Kameron Hurley is an exciting book, and I read it over a single week end, unable to put it down.