"Passionately brutal, fierce, and furious in voice and pace. It's a particularly cinematic experience of war, Full Metal Jacket meets Edge of Tomorrow." -The New York Times
From the Hugo Award–winning author of The Stars Are Legion comes a science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars.
They said the war would turn us into light.
I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.
The Light Brigade: it's what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back…different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief-no matter what actually happens during combat.
Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don't sync up with the platoon's. And Dietz's bad drops tell a story of the war that's not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.
Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero-or maybe a villain; in war it's hard to tell the difference. Kameron Hurley is the acclaimed author of the novels God's War, The Mirror Empire, and The Light Brigade. Hurley has been awarded two Hugo Awards, the Kitschies Award for Best Debut Novel, and has also been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. Visit the author online at KameronHurley.com or on Twitter at @KameronHurley. "Narrator Cara Gee perfectly evokes the weary drawl of a battle-hardened soldier in this intricately constructed science fiction audiobook. The listener follows Dietz (first name unknown) through her mandatory training in the Corporate Corps. She learns to follow orders, to kill, and to cross the galaxy as a beam of light in order to fight the enemy that attacked her planet and destroyed her family. Gee's surface-level portrayal of Dietz seems flat and unemotional-but in a nuanced way that hints at deep anger and confusion. Gee gets more to chew on as the war progresses and Dietz becomes frightened about what's really going on. Jackie Sanders aces her small role as a corporate interrogator who tries to break Dietz."
