The Light Brigade

The Light Brigade is a science fiction novel by the American writer Kameron Hurley, published in 2019. It is set in a dystopian future in which the world is governed by six mega-corporations.

Dietz has just enlisted in the corporate corps, moved by the promise that military service leads to citizenship and by the account of the war that the corporations have given everybody. Citizens are bound to serve corporate goals, while those who are dispossessed and lack status are known as ghouls. The corporate private armies are fighting the separatists of Mars, who are said to have destroyed the entire population of Sao Paulo with an unknown technology in an attack called the Blink. Soldiers are converted into light in order to travel to the front, and some of those who arrive are not the same as the people who left; anybody who tries to describe what happened to them is punished, so the survivors keep quiet. The novel follows Dietz through a war whose stated reasons and actual conduct do not line up.

Hurley's other science fiction deals with war, bodies and political power in the same register, and the world of this book is organised around corporate control of both work and citizenship. The soldiers of the title are the ones who come back different, and the book is about what the corporation does with them.