The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade is one of the best pieces of military science fiction I have ever read. It uses military science fiction as a base–it includes outlandish weapons tech, a boot camp scene, alphabet soup, anti-military-industrial-complex attitudes, anti-powers-that-be mindsets–but it uses these elements of genre to backdrop the book’s story. I appreciate military science fiction that does the genre well. But books that take the genre as a starting point and grow from it tend to stick with me more.

The novel shows Dietz discovering the government’s deceptions by short-circuiting government systems. Dietz is trained to ride the light, to be teleported as a light wave, passively, and somewhat learns how to do it actively. But some light soldiers don’t come back in the same timeline they left in, and Dietz is one of these. Knowing bits and pieces of the war both before and after it happened unsettles Dietz, who starts to lose touch with who is who, when they are what, and what they might know in Dietz’s own life. But as Dietz’s evidence of governmental deception grows, the evidence about people like Dietz gain credibility to the characters around Dietz.

It’s apocalyptic without being gore-porn. It’s gritty without being only dark. It’s complex without losing its own thread. This timeline jumping tendency of the novel had to stress the author as much as it stresses Dietz. I imagine a massive bubble chart, or spreadsheet, next to a list of dates and times–a list showing who is where when, and a bubble chart showing Dietz’s path through that list. It’s an incredibly impressive process to engage in, and one the author absolutely pulls off.

Jumping back and forth, the non-linear timeline is a risk. The lack of clear warnings beforehand, it’s going to put some readers off for sure. But not every book is for every person. So, what does the author gain here, by engaging in this process? I think she gains complexity and a believability to Dietz’s discoveries that take this book past the usual boundaries of military science fiction. Typically, the genre relies on suspicions. Here, the suspicions center around how deep the deception goes, the deception itself is proven to Dietz, but in a way that they can’t prove to another. Typically, the genre achieves complexity by expansion, by bringing in more characters that require more explanation and introduction. Here, the complexity comes from the timeline being non-linear, from Dietz attempting to figure out or remember when they are, and who around them knows what.

As a technical achievement, it’s breathtaking. The plotting and pacing of this novel is insanely complex and Kameron Hurley pulls it off brilliantly. Her themes also play right into current day-to-day struggles: an internet that serves more to deceive and distract than inform, a populace with too-easy access to comfortable echo chambers, fear as a prime motivator, the seeming inevitability of the desires of the powerful, the way we run away and end up exactly where we didn’t want to be, media outlets spinning stories almost beyond recognition, and the narratives we all tell ourselves about our own lives. What is freedom when our primary mode of communication is monitored and governed by rules that we are punished for breaking, but watchers are paid to break? How do we make a country back down from war without resorting to war? How do we push ourselves out of our comfort zones or echo chambers and find other points of view and perspectives? How are we free from fear? These are timely, present day concerns that Hurley delves into deeply, and shows ways around.

Kameron Hurley’s characters and character arcs don’t let the brilliant story and themes down either. Dietz is somebody I would want to spend more time reading about. They captured my attention as their empathy was beat out of them for a higher ideal, which was based on that earlier empathy. They are beat down through unknowable action or situation followed by unknowable action or situation. It’s the story of choosing to look at a near-universal problem from a different angle (Sure, Dietz was initially forced by the malfunctioning light-hopping, but then they chose). Dietz does not portray the typical chosen one storyline. Rather, circumstances force Dietz to act and Dietz fights for the right to change some friends’ futures. And Hurley’s plotting kept me strangely synced to Dietz: when Dietz felt anger over the bridge ceremony, I also had been given enough info and context to feel similarly.

In short, this book is a high-water mark for military science fiction–this easily sails onto my top five list, resting comfortably next to Forever War and Starship Troopers. But, critically, this book bends the genre enough that it’s a great science fiction novel, full stop. This is fantastic stuff here, and I can’t recommend it enough. I haven't wanted to re-read a book this quickly since about 2011 when I first read The City and The City.

The Postman by David Brin

From the title I thought I was in for a romance, or a novel about the importance of lines of communication, or a period piece from the 50s or 60s–either in the 19th or 20th century. I had no idea what to expect. I did not predict this potent portrayal of myth and symbol, organized around a post-apocalyptic story of an Oregon struggling between selfishness and community.

This book does exactly what I’m looking for: it tells a riveting story of action and consequence while still spending enough time on ideas, thoughts, and character development to provide depth and inspiration to the reader. On the one hand, there are fights, shootouts, chases, cons, sex scenes, and drugs–obstacles to overcome, consequences for actions, deaths. On the other hand, in the long spaces in between the terror and the screaming, the Postman’s mind mulls over guilt, his own idealism, and a dozen other topics enough to intrigue me, to give me new thoughts on old topics. Brin balances between these two tendencies beautifully.

“Who will take responsibility?” the technology of the past almost asks, in an almost echo of that ubi sunt motif so familiar to Lit students. “Who killed America?” asks the author. “Who or what could rebuild America?” asks the main character. Critically, Brin doesn’t stop with answering the “Who” in each of these sentences–he also asks “and why?” These are some of the questions guiding the novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed their windings. I think the following are the main themes in this novel:

–The Postman takes responsibility somewhat accidentally. His past is searching for somebody who has taken responsibility for the future: a leader and a group focused on not just survival, but bringing some of the aspects of American culture back. Once connection to his past is taken away from him by the loss of the notebook, his role starts to change–he’s spent so much time trying to find somebody, imagining somebody who has taken responsibility, that he starts to become what he was looking for. Yet, this responsibility comes with a whole heap of guilt, and the inevitability of taking on more guilt. It seems to be this aversion to guilt that has the Postman himself not wanting responsibility, but desperately searching for a person who has taken responsibility. (And in this case I mean responsibility as a kind of symbol of leadership–not literally taking responsibility for the nuclear war that created this mess)

–Expedient decisions, choices, and situations today will plot a course through tomorrow that excludes other options. So, at the most basic level death limits somebody’s options. At a less final level, the Postman picking up the postal uniform because he was cold, and the letter bags because they were good packs, limits his ability to perform his original function of wandering minstrel, because he has taken on a symbology that people long for. He is forced into playing a different role because of the symbol he has put on himself. He starts by looking for this mythical society trying to make things better, then he actually finds a couple of them, but instead of his original goal of settling into a society like that, he ends up being stuck in the wandering lifestyle because of the uniform, the symbol.

–Symbols help establish myths, they become nodes in a network of symbols that forms a type of web that ties a culture together–a myth, in other words. A symbol without context is nothing inherently. A postal uniform on a dead body in a jeep represents nothing more than a strip of cloth and some sewing, a potential warmth to a freezing man. But, when worn in front of people who remember postmen from almost 20 years ago, having not seen one or had much inter-community communication (outside of bullets) for that length of time, the uniform-symbol becomes a hope, a node of nostalgia that brings other possible contexts to mind–communication, order, regularity, money, and something bigger than the immediate community and environment. This small symbol starts carrying more weight and integrates into the context in ways that start to support other government functions–schools, diversifying gene pools, hope, alliances, defense against common enemies, community. The people who accept this symbol, and who are affected by it, are able to form a culture through a collection of symbols and a common enemy. But then, to drive the point home, we see the creation of a new myth as Dena’s death becomes a symbol, and others’ interpretations become symbols. When these symbols start to spread and combine, they start to form the myth of the night of Judiths, the idea of feminism, the idea that strength in forms other than biceps can still be strength. When enough myths come together–Cyclops, the Restored United States, Dena, Powhatan, video games, and the common enemy of the Rogue River Holnists–a culture starts to form. A culture composed of some shared core beliefs and priority structures.

–But the major hurdle to this cultural formation is selfishness. When survival is suspect, selfishness seems necessary at times: if it’s either them or me eating, it makes sense to attempt to be the one that eats. Yet, if everybody works together, they can all eat some. This basic question–individual strength versus community strength–seems to be important in the novel. Maybe I just noticed it more because I live in North Idaho where there are a lot of preppers and people only serving their family, not their community as a whole. Another way that Brin talks about these competing priorities is through the contrasts between fighting for survival, fighting for big ideas or ideals, and fighting for the immediate tribe or small community. He ends the book on a note of bringing together, of the big ideas being a net positive, but he wrinkles that conclusion throughout the book with the philosophizing of the selfish Holnists, and with a history of war:

“Where is it written that one should only care about big things? I fought for big things, long ago… for issues, principles, a country. Where are all of them now?... I found out something, you know. I discovered that the big things don’t love you back. They take and take, and never give in return. They’ll drain your blood, your soul, if you let them, and never let go.”

Or,

“It did you no good to fight for the Big Things . . . for civilization, for instance. All you accomplished was getting young girls and boys to believe in you—to throw their lives away in worthless gestures, accomplishing nothing.”

Yet the ideas and ideals, when pursued appropriately, when balanced with preservation and hope and a clear understanding of possibilities both good and bad, is the ultimate thrust of the novel. Johnny embodies these arguments: he recognizes the importance of the bear patch on the injured soldier’s arm, yet he stays too focused on the sanctity of the symbol he embodies, the postal service. The first leads the world to a better place and Johnny’s curiosity about it helps. The second shows an obsession that ultimately occludes the context and kills him, putting everybody around him into greater danger when they need to escape and communicate the existence of the bear patch to another group of people.

–A culture, being a web of myths that hold together a people in commonalities, will be killed from within, not without. The selfish strength of the Holnists is what ultimately kills America, not the diseases, famines, nuclear explosions, or resource scarcity. The people who opt out of society and prey upon it from within, who take the benefits of that society–technology, knowledge, food, clothing, life–and use those against the society are more dangerous than possible invaders, nuclear winter, or plagues. This powerful message is repeated a few times through the book–some with showing and some with telling. And Brin even allows some even-handed wrinkles to come in near the end, as the Holnists get a chance to explain their position and drop their anonymity in a way that I respect. They are still judged wrong, but at least Brin gives them their best side through telling.

–The other themes within this book are about how we personally carry guilt; how strength is not just the most guns and smarts, but can also be found in community and trust, in feminism (via the Book of Judith) and the postal service; doing what is necessary and doing what is moral; and duty contrasted with personal desire.

Mix all these discussions in with a plot that moves, that allows consequences and actions, that kills off main characters, and we’ve got a novel that does everything I want. Sure, there are aspects of this novel I think could’ve been done better, but they’re niggling around the edges of what is, to me, a fantastic novel.

My main problem is with the pacing. For a book so stuffed with complexities and interesting musings, it starts with a simple pulp fiction shootout, not giving enough hints towards the complexity within. I kept reading simply because Brin’s rewarded my patience in other books. And this story exploded outwards into an amazing kaleidoscope of a complex society facing complex problems and discovering/deciding on complex systems to put in place–rewarding indeed. However, one side effect of focusing on the musings about myth and symbol and responsibility and ego and community is that I stopped caring or thinking about the history of the world being described, and the revelation about survivors from a government program at the end surprised me. To be clear, I’m not sure whether that’s because I personally focused on the musings, or whether Brin made a mistake in bringing in new story elements too late in the novel. (As I’ve said before, I prefer the early Pixar tactic of introducing every suspension of disbelief in the first 10 minutes, then letting everything else fall out of that. Here the past culture is technologically advanced in terms of computing, but suddenly they are also advanced in terms of gene modification, and that was something else for the reader to accept, in the last couple chapters of books.) However, Brin gets away with the two problems I list above because, well, the rest of the book is brilliant, and because he has set this expansion of topics, theme, and scope up by having an outsider coming into Central and Western Oregon, knowing nothing about what he is stepping into–readers learn along with the eponymous postman.

There, niggling over. Now this is one of the best David Brin books I’ve ever read, and I would recommend it to almost everybody. It is that good.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

 

Around when Wired magazine was founded to appeal to fans of Cyberpunk, in the early 90s, two people used novels to satirize the genre and attempt to reform it or tear it down. Right time, right place. One was the man who invented the term cyberpunk, Bruce Bethke, who wrote Headcrash after Stephenson published Snowcrash. I am very thankful for what Stephenson did. I am stoked that somebody took the piss out of these self-centered, egotistical anti-heroes. And he did it in a way that uses some humor.

Unfortunately, what he wrote and published is crap. Instead of clever ideas, Stephenson cackles at the sheer number of ideas that he half-cocks into the novel. Some indict Cyberpunk, like Raven and Gargoyles. But others follow the genre tropes as unquestioningly and blindly as the bad stuff getting called Cyberpunk before it. If you write a bad novel and then tell everybody you did it on purpose, it’s still a bad novel.

I love satire. The Divine Comedy is what sealed my love of lit in the 10th grade. I should love this even more: it’s both Satire and Cyberpunk, combined. But no, this is a mess. I was bored halfway through and disappointed by every single element simply thrown against the wall to drip down to the pitch black alley below.

Language: China Mieville said more about language in a single chapter of Embassytown than this mess said in the whole book.

Heroes: Instead of writing an anti-anti-hero, Stephenson just wrote another shallow cyberpunk anti-hero.

Myth: Come on. Mentioning myth is not the same thing as discussing it.

I’ll stop here, something Stephenson did not know how to do. This is the novel of a person obsessed with their own cleverness, with no knowledge of how to tie up a narrative thread or say no to his impulses. This is the novel of a person who attempts to make us sympathetic to the rape and sexual assault of a 15 year old child. This is the novel of a person who wants simply to tear down, and not offer any ideas to build back up. As such, I have no time for this novel. After reading it once, I was unable to bring myself to read it again.

As a pulp adventure, I enjoyed my first read of it. Upon reflection, it was unfocused, discursive crap. Is he saying yay objective truth (Namshubs) or yay subjectivity (them chosing their reality [for now] at the end?).

Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos

This is a great science fiction novel and if anybody placed it alongside the all-time top tier of Military Science Fiction, I wouldn’t necessarily agree, but I would respect that opinion. I am so thankful that I read book two in the series after Terms of Enlistment annoyed me. Where Terms of Enlistment showed glimpses of hope and promise—glimpses of characters and a willingness to engage with plot implications—Lines of Departure nailed that promise, fulfilled that hope.

Five years after the aliens appeared without warning, (except the clear warning to a reader that this is Military Science Fiction and somebody said, “at least there ain’t no aliens”—talk about Chekhov's gun) humanity is getting stomped. And our main character has had five years to question things he discovered in Boot Camp, or on his first deployments in the TA, or during his legal troubles, etc. All of those interesting plot implications in the first book that Kloos mentioned then dropped, he picks those up here and hands them the keys to the story.

The key lessons to me all follow from that simple fact: the plot and technology imply things about how people and cultures interact, change, prioritize, believe—and this novel engages those implications, rides them. It’s not a philosopher’s text, with 164 pages explicating one single quote about a map (don’t get me wrong, I love that book too). Rather, instead of having the main character casually call down nuclear weapons near his position, then ignoring the shellshock that may cause, Kloos delves into it. Not for the whole book, not for whole chapters, not as much as Dostoevsky would, but as appropriate in Grayson’s downtime, and for long enough that readers understand more about Grayson. This tactic by Kloos, this balance of inspection and plot, hits a ratio that changes throughout the novel as more and less important things happen to the main character—and hits a thread with readers as this series is insanely popular across typical political divides.

The main character still bangs his head repeatedly against things he doesn’t understand—the aliens, the decisions of political powers running the war, the changes of Earth cultures, changes within himself, and the changing alliances within humanity. Kloos allows mystery and room for growth to still exist. He allows hope. In this way the future becomes a character in the book—an alluring character to Grayson, who engages in such a dangerous profession.

It seems like Kloos sat back and thought about his first novel, and this one’s story, from an outsider’s perspective, imagined how his own plot points would affect a person, discovered that his 18 year old main character in Terms of Enlistment would need a few years for those lessons to sink in, skipped those years and got straight to the point where they started to sink in. Sensational. This tactic alone let the main character become a character and not a caricature.

But this book also allows its own plot to affect the main character. As he works through the plot and story points throughout this novel, the main character recognizes more of the implications of the plot, deals or starts to deal with more of them. Sure, he’s not delving into the main character as much as Dostoevsky would, but that’s fine. I don’t need or want Russian introspection from every novel I read. I appreciate various approaches in what I read.

The rest of the series does this over and over again. There are certain plot points that are glossed over a bit too much here and there—like blowing up the seed ship or Grayson's pill dependency. Also, Grayson discovers too much firsthand about the aliens, when I would've loved to see more about how he responded to others' discoveries without firsthand experience. But the characters become better defined, change in meaningful ways, and the minor niggles do not detract from what is a great science fiction series in my mind, which has a planned end point in book 8, which should come out in August of 2022.

Quarter, Half, and Full Share by Nathan Lowell

Quarter Share

This book works for me, and that also surprises me, because the narrative structure here follows the episodic, vignette style that Terms of Enlistment follows. Where this structure did not work there, it works here. And I want to figure out why.

Plot Summary: A young boy, 18 and just about to go to college, lives in a future economic dystopia. His mother dies unexpectedly and he is about to be deported. He has three options: find a job and stay on the company planet, join a military, or ship out with a trader fleet. (and if you think for a second that this isn’t going to be a libertarian trader fleet, then welcome to science fiction! Enjoy your first book.) He chooses a Libertarian trading fleet, and the rest of the book is simply his onboarding and a couple of their first stops at stations. He starts each day, he does some stuff, he ends each day.

Some people who dislike this book seem to point to a perception that nothing happens and nothing is at stake. However, those two linked complaints don’t hold water for me. I appreciate works where “nothing happens” like Raymond Carver or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In Solzhenitsyn the stakes stay low compared to end of the world or human extinction plots that science fiction sometimes uses. Though I appreciate plots that shove humans into extreme situations—they often allow us to examine basic premises and structures of perception or belief by stripping away layers of civility—I don’t need those plots to stay interested. One person’s rock-bottom is another person’s success. But these linked complaints do show a lack of engagement on the readers’ parts: they struggled to engage with the main character’s growth, maybe because they struggled to find it. It shows the author not communicating in ways they understand. And that’s fine to me—not every book is written for me and I’m not going to like every book another person likes.

Here, specifically, I appreciate the exploration, the growth—at least of knowledge—of the main character. These vignettes show days of his life that exist, that he did not expect, where he learns something or does something to help those around him. Rather than battle scenes followed by a boss battle like Terms of Enlistment showed, Quarter Share shows the main character living. It’s more slice of life, and less skipping over interesting aspects to get back to shooting things. I’m pretty sick of shallow video games that skip over interesting implications of the plot, and books that do the same thing also bore me. As such, the lack of an overarching plot did not bother me here, I thought it was an asset for the type and style of tale that the author wanted to tell.

And that core concept will determine whether anybody else appreciates this book or not. The main character is a little too good/lucky, sure, and the others are not fleshed out enough. But I actually found this quite engaging. It surprised me.

I believe there are some missed opportunities in this short book, but these missed opportunities merely excite me, fire my imagination, and drive home questions about presumptions I didn’t think I held. I think that’s probably more on the reader than the book, but maybe it isn’t.

Half Share

To give this book credit, the first half was simply a strong continuation of Quarter Share. I enjoyed it. And then the other shoe dropped. Literally, his name is Ishmael: I should’ve guessed. Let me put it to you this way: the ship goes through an actual emergency where death is a very real possibility in about five ways—a rarity in this world, as the prior parts of this story clearly show. Ishmael is the one who solves all five, despite being in space for only 9 months, being possibly concussed at the time, being the lowest on the totem pole, and everybody else having grown up in space with way more knowledge and experience. I laughed out loud. After this “Ishmael Idiot Savant Saves Everybody at Everything” scene, or scenes, it got worse.

He then becomes a sex idol.

I should’ve put it down right then and there, but I had a couple hours left in my drive and no other audiobooks loaded onto my phone. So, the wish fulfillment adolescent fantasy took over the narrative and didn’t work. It’s unconvincing and it’s regrettable considering how Quarter Share worked so unconventionally.

Full Share

OK, Quarter Share worked and I want more of that. The first half of Half Share also worked before Ishmael started solving everything no sweat and became a sex idol. Maybe the author realized that the adolescent wish fulfillment fantasy was not the right track?

Nope. The author didn’t realize. To quote one part, one astrogator asks another to do something else “while I have a long conversation with our savior here”. Ishmael space savior slash sex idol continues and not in any engaging or interesting ways. It’s not worth it. At all.

(And then I read the reviews on Goodreads to see if anything worthwhile was coming. Apparently the next book in this fumbling series deals with sexual violence in dismissive ways and oh boy do I not want to read that.)

Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos

It's no secret that I enjoy military science fiction now and again: the fast-paced plots of pulp fiction sometimes act as predictable palate cleansers, pondering people in extreme circumstances seems human 101, and occasionally something spectacular comes out like The Forever War, or Starship Troopers, or The Light Brigade.

Marko Kloos' Terms of Enlistment leaves me wanting more in bad ways. It has an episodic series of stories, with no overarching story that I can find. Andrew arms himself to go shopping, then disarms himself to join the military, then has basic, then a milk run, then a cluster-cuss, pause for retraining/more training, then aliens. These episodic type stories work so much better in comic books and television, and have a hard time holding together as a novel—without an overarching story arc. The novel is a bound unit and I expect some cohesion throughout it, some reason for so many pages to be printed with words. As a physical device a 24 page comic book encourages episodic, 24 page pacing.

Andrew should've stayed in the Territorial Army on Earth: he starts to question things in interesting and engaging ways during the cluster-cuss and hospital stay afterwards. He wonders why the policing of the people he has sworn to protect and serve places him in a position of killing hundreds of them. He starts to be surrounded by characters instead of caricatures. He starts to reflect on his own premises and how they led him to the belief structures he operates within. The author even implies that dead character we hardly saw on-scene was actually a character in Andrew's mind. But, after a few pages or sporadic paragraphs of the book finally engaging in something other than "flechette rifles r cool", the author drops that thread, returns the cast to caricatures, and moves Andrew into the Navy, shipping him off planet and resetting the entire story and character. He even has his terms of enlistment reset from the day he transfers, meaning that his time in the TA literally meant nothing to him. As a reader I was disgusted.

Aliens. Why? Is this just what military science fiction authors all default to? "First contact! Bang-bang." Start with half a book stating a few times that there are no aliens, THEN THERE ARE. OMG. It wasn't a part of the story that felt integral: it wasn't used to develop characters, it wasn't foreshadowed for more than 1-2 chapters, and by this point the reader is 3/4 through the book, and it felt like one-upsmanship. How much more crazy could the combat situations get? We started with practice rounds in basic where nobody dies; then a milk run embassy evacuation; then a food riot that turns into a cluster-cuss; then aliens. It feels hamfisted and forced, like a D&D campaign where each combat levels up.

There were interesting questions here, but few of them lasted much more than four words before being abandoned by the author. The main character isn't one of those "perfect" wish-fulfillment characters, but I also can't think of a flaw he is battling against to achieve his agenda. It's just a series of combat vignettes strung together less well than most fix-ups I've read. In short, it was fine and I started book 2. Not sure I'll finish it though.

[Edit on 2/11/2022: To be clear, I continued the series because of two main reasons: the author got better and by the end Halley at least was starting to become a character, and because the author at least noticed that the plot was bringing up interesting questions and mentioned them in passing instead of ignoring them entirely.]