The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley, 2020 Hugo finalist. I read this without knowing much about it and was totally into it; MAJOR SPOILERS behind the cut below. I do want to put a content heads-up for the book here first though: significant graphic violence/gore, child harm, and animal harm.


So, I love time travel when it's well-written, and this is so clever and well-constructed. This is the kind of book, that, when I finished it, I thought "damn, Hurley must have had some serious charts to keep track of this", and it turns out she put some of them up in a blog post and they're very satisfying. It's a great gimmick, the jumping, the inside-out version of Edge of Tomorrow; instead of being elevated above the fog of war by special perspective, the protag is extra-submerged within it, and we really feel her disorientation. (I caught that Hurley wasn't overtly gendering Dietz and I tried to keep in mind they could be a dude, but I always fell back into thinking of her as a woman and wasn't surprised at all at the end when we finally got a first name. I'm curious how other people saw her, especially a) men and enbies, who would maybe be less likely to default to woman (??), and b) people who can compare how they read the protag in Scalzi's Lock In series, who I always read as a dude even once it was pointed out that was never specified.) Anyways, this is good stuff; I don't think it beats Memory Called Empire on either my personal ballot or the final results, but... well, I was going to say "top half" but I still have two I haven't read so I should probably hold my horses there.

Oh, also - I'm curious how this reads if you haven't read Starship Troopers and Forever War. I'm all in favor of us being in the "we don't all need to have read stuff from the 20th century" period of sff fandom, so what's the default mil-SF novel for the modern reader? Old Man's War? Is this to Old Man's War as Forever War is to Starship Troopers? Maybe it *will* win the Hugo, hrm.