The Light Brigade

Listen: Private Dietz has come unstuck in time.

It's the big final war between the rebels on Mars and the ordered, free societies of Earth. (So what if the Martians were earthlings once; it's not like we, as a species, have a good historical record of remembering who our friends and enemies are.) Sao Paolo, one of the greatest cities on Earth after most of North America was wiped out in an earlier war, is destroyed and Dietz, having lost both family and city, signs up to avenge them. Becoming one of the dreaded space marines who can teleport to any place in the Solar System and arrive ready to kick ass.

I teleported home one night, With Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg.

The Light Brigade is a novel of entropy, of breakdown; of society as late-stage capitalism moves to the only end point it knows, of self as part of basic training, of molecules as people are beamed as photons across space, and of the genre; what at first looks like a straight update of Starship Troopers (or Tropers), Verhoeven's more than Heinlein's, quickly starts falling apart under reality, and gets mixed up in body parts from other corpses; Orwell, Vonnegut, Adams, probably a dozen I'm not familiar with, stuck together with Hurley's trademark love of goo and gore and fueled by a healthy dollop of Trump-era anger.

The Light Brigade certainly isn't a subtle novel. It is just as certainly a thrilling, fun, horrifying and clever novel that twists itself around itself so many times (possibly one too many, but it's no big complaint) that by the time it comes out with a big fist in the air at the end I'm almost blinded.