Página InicialGruposDiscussãoMaisZeitgeist
Pesquisar O Sítio Web
Este sítio web usa «cookies» para fornecer os seus serviços, para melhorar o desempenho, para analítica e (se não estiver autenticado) para publicidade. Ao usar o LibraryThing está a reconhecer que leu e compreende os nossos Termos de Serviço e Política de Privacidade. A sua utilização deste sítio e serviços está sujeita a essas políticas e termos.

Resultados dos Livros Google

Carregue numa fotografia para ir para os Livros Google.

The Light Brigade por Kameron Hurley
A carregar...

The Light Brigade (original 2019; edição 2019)

por Kameron Hurley (Autor)

MembrosCríticasPopularidadeAvaliação médiaMenções
6573235,010 (3.9)33
"'The war has turned us into light. Transforming us into light is the fastest way to travel from one front to another, and there are many fronts, now. I always wanted to be a hero. I always wanted to be on the side of light. It's funny how things work out.' Soldiers in the war against Mars, The Light Brigade, live brief lives, but the veterans are starting to be affected by changes in their bodies and minds, slipping in and out of time, or are they simply going mad? From Hugo award-winning author of The Stars Are Legion is a novel about interplanetary warriors who are losing their humanity."--… (mais)
Membro:jblopez
Título:The Light Brigade
Autores:Kameron Hurley (Autor)
Informação:Gallery / Saga Press (2019), Edition: First Edition first Printing, 368 pages
Coleções:A sua biblioteca
Avaliação:
Etiquetas:verge-best-sci-fi-2019

Informação Sobre a Obra

The Light Brigade por Kameron Hurley (2019)

A carregar...

Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro.

Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.

» Ver também 33 menções

Mostrando 1-5 de 31 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
In this dystopian SF novel Dietz is freshly recruited infantry soldier joining the fight on side of Earth corporations (Big Six) against aliens from Mars after MArtians manage to disappear entire Earth city.

To be clear aliens are not little grey men nor multi-limb creatures from nightmare. They are basically human colonists who gained independence from Earth Corporations and became the ultimate corpo-horror, socialists! with advanced technology

Due to the distances only way of transporting troops is by beaming them in form of light ray to the battlefield. And as one can imagine deconstructing someone into photons and then constructing them on the other end tends to have its bad-sides, not least of which is failure at re-construction of soldier on the far-away destination (if you remember that scene from Galaxy Quest movie then you know what I mean .... small technical glitch :)).

Very soon Dietz will find herself in very bad situation and if there is something corporate minds dont like is situations that cannot be fed to the masses. After unraveling details about what is going on Dietz will need to make capital decision on how to proceed and this might affect our entire world as we know it.

Story is fast paced and author manages very skillfully to navigate the non-linear story-line. Atmosphere is very palpable and brought to the reader in a very straight-to-the-matter-no-verbose way which is quite an achievement considering that in these situations authors sometimes overdo it and even invent entire new lingo. Corporations monitoring everyone by forcing them to use goggles and/or lenses so privacy is something you cannot have, social classes that are brutally divided in have and have-nots, harsh treating of soldiers and almost laboratory approach to treating their issues after multiple beam-ups, deadly confrontations with artillery and star-ships vaporizing everything in their path, constant lies and propaganda, cyberpunk-like inter-corporation conflicts.... in short this is very strong novel that relates to much of our own world today.

And final twist .... I can only say very sad but also very realistic approach to the problem.

Recommended to all fans of SF in general, military SF in particular. ( )
  Zare | Jan 23, 2024 |
Let me just start by saying: The Light Brigade, the new standalone science fiction time-travel novel by Kameron Hurley, is a resounding triumph and already one of my top reads of 2020. I loved it so much, I can't wait to read it again.

The Light Brigade is in many ways the spiritual heir to Haldeman's The Forever War, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and Scalzi's The Old Man's War. The Light Brigade has a very modern tone, updated to our very real cultural moment of endless wars (think Iraq and Afghanistan) and corporate/media dominance and influence, xenophobia as well as our obsession with "fake news." It is also the spiritual heir to the works of PKD too, as The Light Brigade is quite the mind fuck as it juggles multiple timelines.

So what is it about?

Hurley’s future is a bleak one: six massive corporations run vast parts of society, controlling the media and privatizing services that their citizens have access to, provided they’ve signed extensive contracts. We’re introduced to Dietz, a young soldier who joins the Tene-Silvia Corporate Corps in the aftermath of “The Blink,” an event that destroyed much of São Paulo (and Dietz's family among them) and has been blamed on colonists from Mars.

That mysterious incident sparks an intense war, and Dietz signs up out of a desire to find some meaning in her life and to avenge the 2 million people who were blinked away, not thinking about what signing up might cost her personally.

Based on a short story Hurley published in 2015, The Light Brigade roughly follows the formula that Heinlein came up with decades ago. We follow Dietz’s progress through basic training where, as in books like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, trainees are pushed until they break, and are then rebuilt to obey orders and fight for whatever values they’re told. Hurley’s soldiers have a bit of tech that Heinlein and Haldeman’s didn’t have: teleportation.

When called to active duty, Dietz (gender unspecified for most of the book, but you’ll figure it out fairly soon) experiences missions out of sequence with linear time, losing and regaining comrades, ordered to perform morally dubious actions which don’t seem to lead to victory, and gradually collecting information that strongly suggests that the enemy is not whom Dietz was told it was.

What is powerful about The Light Brigade is that Dietz is caught in a war that she can’t escape, but she has a unique vantage point; one that leads her to question the very nature of not only the war that she’s fighting, but of the entire society of which she’s a part. Dietz, with her unique way of experiencing the world, learns that her situation isn’t beyond her control, and that she has the power to change the state of the world.

Hurley's world is a feudalistic technological nightmare, where all citizens are defined by their host corporations. Freedom is an illusion. I once tried reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers and ended up throwing the book across the room because I couldn't shallow the idea implied that one has to earn their freedom through military service. While the world of The Light Brigade suggests freedom is an illusion (your essentially the property of a host corporation), Hurley does seem to suggest that free will does exist as Dietz learns that the key to her entire predicament comes down to taking control of her situation in order to save everyone.

The Light Brigade contains many homages to other sci-fi classics beyond just the above mentioned names. There is obviously a Star Trek influence. And there is a reference to Dune. With is to say: scifi nerds will love this book.

Read this if you enjoy challenging, thought-provoking and REVELANT military sci-fi that isn't afraid of a little body horror while challenging the status quo.




( )
  ryantlaferney87 | Dec 8, 2023 |
This is an amazing story and really a huge what if/cautionary tale of how our future could turn out if we don't fix some things.

Sheer genius and I'd just learned that Cara Gee is the narrator for the audio book so now I'm going to absolutely have to listen to that. ( )
  beentsy | Aug 12, 2023 |
I devoured this book. It grabbed hold of me and did not let go until the end.

The story it tells, that of soldier Gina Dietz in a war between the several corporations that own/run Earth and the humans of Mars, blazes along. If you're looking for fast-paced sci-fi action, read this book. (And/or read the author's other book, The Stars Are Legion.)

Dietz and her fellow soldiers do not serve in just any army. They fight for one of the corporations against Mars. Dietz's family, what was left of it, had been in São Paulo, and Mars destroyed most of the city, making this war about as personal as it gets for her. What makes the corporate armies novel is how they get around. Basically, they use a Star Trek-esque transporter technology that glitches just a bit more than does its inspiration.

The glitches -- which include people being fused with objects or with each other, going insane, and/or coming back with parts in the wrong places -- happen at a rate considered acceptable when compared with historical non-combat causality rates of soldiers (stuff like dying from disease and mundane transportation accidents).

Dietz's personal stake not withstanding, she does not devolve into vengeful brutality. Her self-image is too heroic for that: she sees herself as a paladin, doing the right thing, helping others. It doesn't take long before that runs up against the typical way soldiers get treated, especially in wartime: having limited access to information, being guinea pigs on occasion, and considered expendable to one extent or another. The authoritarian rule of the corporations magnifies these tendencies.

The first time Dietz goes on a mission and experiences the tech's other problem is 'merely' confusing. But as these glitches accumulate, she starts to piece together a picture that is quite different from the company line. The mystery in that picture is compelling, and Hurley doles it out perfectly, never giving too much nor waiting too long before the next morsel.

This piecemeal unveiling of the truth wedded to the intense action drives the story forward. It drove me too, drove me to listen whenever I had a few free minutes and made me reluctant to hit pause. And I didn't mind at all.

If you've looked at the genres for this book, you know it involves time travel. And you probably also know a lot of ink has been spilled on time-travel stories that don't handle the paradoxes inherent in it well. As I'm avoiding spoilers, I'll just say that Brigade does not suffer from this.

I also appreciated how Hurley didn't do any info dumping. You learn the world through the Dietz's experiences, and you learn only what you need for the purpose of the story. This book maintains a laser focus on story.

Not that I'm adverse to grand world building and some exposition, or even a lot of exposition. I love the epic stories of high fantasy and space opera that indulge in this. But in something like Brigade, a fast-paced action-sci-fi novel, that's not the sort of thing you want. Hurley respects that to a tee.

I should talk a bit about the narration. Cara Gee, of The Expanse series fame, does the honors. And it's a solid narration. She has good voices for the various characters regardless of gender. My only qualm was her Portuguese pronunciation, which was terrible. Not that I would expect she'd know how to pronounce Brazilian place names - it's not her fault. And I recognize that the vast majority the book's listeners don't know how to either. But I do, and it was annoying. Simon & Schuster surely could've spared the time and money to teach her how to say São Paulo and Fortaleza at least. I mean, hell, I could teach someone how to do that in a few minutes. Not even enough time to bother charging someone for.

So, who shouldn't read this? Squeamish people. There's some pretty gross stuff in it. Plus, it's basically a war memoir, so has a lot of violence and death. How the conflict between corporations run amok versus the Martians, who have a social democracy of some sort (few details are given), is framed will likely turn off some more conservative people. There's a small amount of preaching about this near the end too.

Other than that, read this, listen to it. You won't be disappointed. ( )
  qaphsiel | Feb 20, 2023 |
In the future large corporations run the world and there is a hard social strata of people; citizens, residents, and ghouls. Dietz is a former ghoul and current resident thanks to their parents’ hard work. Dietz is a fresh recruit in the corporation’s army. Tech now allows for people to be broken into light particles and travel anywhere they are sent to fight. But after their first drop, Dietz starts to realize she isn’t traveling through time like everyone else. Dietz remembers jumps that haven’t happened yet to the rest of the squad. The corps also know this and try to use the intel they can glean from her and a few others like Dietz. But even with this advantage things are going poorly and Dietz and some others decide that Dietz needs to change what is coming in order to save the world. ( )
  Glennis.LeBlanc | Jan 4, 2023 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 31 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica

» Adicionar outros autores (5 possíveis)

Nome do autorPapelTipo de autorObra?Estado
Kameron Hurleyautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Ventrue, EveArtista da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Tem de autenticar-se para poder editar dados do Conhecimento Comum.
Para mais ajuda veja a página de ajuda do Conhecimento Comum.
Título canónico
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Data da publicação original
Pessoas/Personagens
Locais importantes
Acontecimentos importantes
Filmes relacionados
Epígrafe
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Don't just fight the darkness. Bring the light.
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
For Hannah.
This is all her fault....
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
They said the war would turn us into light.
Citações
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Nota de desambiguação
Editores da Editora
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Autores de citações elogiosas (normalmente na contracapa do livro)
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês. Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Língua original
DDC/MDS canónico
LCC Canónico

Referências a esta obra em recursos externos.

Wikipédia em inglês

Nenhum(a)

"'The war has turned us into light. Transforming us into light is the fastest way to travel from one front to another, and there are many fronts, now. I always wanted to be a hero. I always wanted to be on the side of light. It's funny how things work out.' Soldiers in the war against Mars, The Light Brigade, live brief lives, but the veterans are starting to be affected by changes in their bodies and minds, slipping in and out of time, or are they simply going mad? From Hugo award-winning author of The Stars Are Legion is a novel about interplanetary warriors who are losing their humanity."--

Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas.

Descrição do livro
Resumo Haiku

Current Discussions

Nenhum(a)

Capas populares

Ligações Rápidas

Avaliação

Média: (3.9)
0.5
1 3
1.5
2 8
2.5 5
3 43
3.5 12
4 71
4.5 9
5 57

É você?

Torne-se num Autor LibraryThing.

 

Acerca | Contacto | LibraryThing.com | Privacidade/Termos | Ajuda/Perguntas Frequentes | Blogue | Loja | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas Legadas | Primeiros Críticos | Conhecimento Comum | 203,240,788 livros! | Barra de topo: Sempre visível