![]() ![]() It was hard for me to keep all the time travel in my head, but 1) it is logically sound, and 2) not that important except to illustrate that Dietz knows things about the end of the war that she can apply to situations earlier in the war. But there’s very much an Edge of Tomorrow-like wrinkle here, too, because when Dietz “blinks” (which basically means transported at light speed as particles), she keeps blinking into different timelines, so she’s not fighting the war chronologically. By virtue of living on Mars for generations, they have been othered by Earth’s Big Six corporations (yes, it’s also a metaphor for immigration and colonization. Oh, but here’s the kicker: It’s wrapped in this fantastic sci-fi premise about how soldiers are “blinked” to Mars to battle aliens, who are really just humans who resisted their corporate overlords and escaped Earth. About how, by taking everything away from us, corporations can command our loyalty by offering us basic necessities in exchange for fighting their wars, which generate profits. It’s also about politics, about how our leaders create divisions and then exploit those divisions to maintain their power. And that’s the thing about The Light Brigade: It is a sci-fi novel about a war fought between the Earth and Mars, but it’s really a novel about the dangers of capitalism, about how corporate America turns us into mindless soldiers willing to sacrifice our lives for the one percent. ![]() And again, I’m not the audience for this: I like contemporary literary fiction, mystery thrillers, coming-of-age novels, politics, and history. This is relevant to The Light Brigade because it’s a sci-fi novel about a soldier fighting a war against Mars. It was years before they thought to even check the actual bones of the skeletons, instead of just saying, “Sword means dude!” and realized their mistake. Which is it comes as no surprise that the folks excavating Viking graves didn’t bother to check whether the graves they dug up were male or female. Here’s a passage: When we talk about war, we talk about soldiers and female soldiers.īecause this is the way we talk, when we talk about history and use the word “soldiers” it immediately erases any women doing the fighting. The first is “ Challenging the Women, Cattle, and Slaves Narrative,” which is one of the best Professor Wilson articles not written by Professor Wilson I have ever read, and it’s basically how language has been used to erase the historical contributions of women to combat in war. I reported this funny anecdote back to Steven, and it turns out that Kayleigh is also a huge fan of Kameron Hurley, and the two of them pointed me toward a couple of articles that retroactively helped inform my thoughts on The Light Brigade. Then I realized that our own Professor Wilson had suggested I follow Hurley on Twitter a few weeks prior, not because of her sci-fi work, but because of her political tweets. Has Twitter started auto-following accounts they think I might like? (Because, it turns out, I really did like her tweets.)Īnyway, I read the book, and I loved it. ![]() Who is this person, and why am I following her, I wondered. So I get the book, I start reading it, and then I dumbly realize that all the raves for The Light Brigade were actually retweeted by the author, Kameron Hurley, who I had never in my life heard of. Sci-fi novels aren’t really my thing, but it kept popping up over and over again until I finally relented. A few weeks ago, I started noticing a novel called The Light Brigade show up repeatedly on my Twitter timeline along with rave reviews. ![]()
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