Choice is a freedom open only to citizens and even then it’s mostly illusion. People are little more than cogs in the machine, their only worth seen through the lens of their potential use to the corporations. If it seems more like a what if, than a when…well, take a better look around. Now they're fighting their own wars, against each other as much as the apparent Martian threat.

This is a world controlled by corporations, giant multi-national companies which have supplanted governments but perpetuate the very worst of their combined aspects. But what if the only way out of this unending war is lost somewhere in the welter of bloody, confusing images? What if the truth is something only Dietz can discover? Out of sync with fellow grunts and increasingly uncertain about what or when’s real, Dietz is starting to attract the wrong kind of attention. Being broken down into particles of light and beamed off-planet, propelled from one hot zone to another, watching comrades die from drops gone bad even before the fighting starts….all this is grim enough, but Dietz is experiencing it all wrong. The corps have got their own revolutionary tech, a way of moving armies across space. All that’s left now is revenge, so Dietz signs up for the corporate military, the best way to take the fight to those responsible: Mars. But the proof is in the absence of millions of souls, a whole city disappeared. Nobody thought anything like that could happen, nobody knew tech like that existed. “A smart, brutal, and structurally sophisticated military science fiction tale with a time travel twist.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred reviewĭietz’s family were destroyed in the Blink, wiped out in an instant. “Rereads will be both necessary and desirable.” KIKUS, starred review “This is the real thing.” JAMES SA COREY, author of The Expanse series

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero − or maybe even a villain. And the bad drops tell a story of war that’s not what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think it is. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief − no matter what happens during combat.ĭietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops which don’t sync up with the platoon’s. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do. Grunts in the corporate corps get broken into light, travelling from interplanetary battlefronts. The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. They said the war would turn us into light. From the Hugo Award-winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a brand-new science fiction thriller about a futuristic war.

The light brigade by kameron hurley