There are certain preconceptions
that come with military SF. We tend to think
of ultraviolent, gung-ho space marine-types
blasting away at anonymous aliens and
mindlessly throwing away their lives. Of course,
given that The Light Brigade comes from
Kameron Hurley, author of The Stars Are Legion
and The Geek Feminist Revolution, we know that
we’re in for something different.
Springing from a short story, the novel follows
a recruit named Dietz as she joins the corporate
corps and heads off to fight, but an accident that
occurs during a jump will leave her questioning
not only her sanity but the nature of this conflict.
What was the starting point for the
original The Light Brigade short story?
I tend to start my pieces with only broad strokes
of knowledge about what’s coming. This story
started with a very small idea – what if we could
break people up into balls of light to get them
from one war front to another? Not invisible
beaming technology, but literally balls of light?
My academic background is in war and
resistance movements, and I’m a fan of novels
like Armor, The Stars My Destination, and
The Forever War. I had a cohort of high
school friends who joined the military right
after high school, and watching their journey
from excitement and propaganda to active
deployment after 9/11 and eventual disillusion
was sobering. There was a powerful quote from
a former soldier that I read over the course
of my research, about how he had signed up
thinking he was going to be a Jedi hero working
for the resistance, and then realised he was
actually a stormtrooper for the Empire. I wanted
to follow a fresh group of recruits as they
experienced that journey.
How did you approach constructing
the timeline of time slips?
There are many military science fiction novels
that address the humanity – or erosion of
humanity – that war inflicts on us. They are
usually written by veterans who saw combat.
People who have seen and experienced the
worst of war write about it much differently.
Books like Armor and The Forever War do a
better job of showing the disillusioned face of
war, and how it transforms those it runs through
the grinder.
As said, I’ve seen some of this first-hand
with friends and family, and my academic
background is in war and resistance. If you
spend a lot of time reading primary source
material from people who have been to war,
you get a good view of the horror of it all
outside the propaganda. The fact that this
responsibility is often dumped on poor young
people with few choices makes it even worse. It
was important to me that we see how the system
is meant to break young people down and
remake them, yes – but also to show how they
can take their lives back and remake themselves.Similarly, was it important to have an
element of hope to counterbalance
some of the grim aspects of the story
and political commentary?
Absolutely. Ursula K Le Guin’s National Book
Award speech, where she noted that anything
made by human hands can be unmade by
them, really stuck with me. It’s a vital reminder
in this day and age, when the inertia of shit
in the world feels insurmountable. We have to
understand that nothing is truly inevitable. You
can take control of the construct.Which authors are you most excited
about at the moment?
We’re living in a golden age of science fiction,
which is both wonderful and overwhelming – my
pile of books to read never, ever, gets shorter.
We have masters of the craft like NK Jemisin
coming into their own, folks like Martha Wells
finally getting the respect they deserve, and
newer writers like Cassandra Khaw, Rebecca
Roanhorse, and Ada Palmer doing some really
exciting work.
Tor.com has given a lot of newer writers who
write weird stuff a nice platform, too. Folks like
Spencer Ellsworth and Sarah Gailey have been
able to write work for them and that would have
been nigh-on impossible to sell at that length to
other publishers. Lucky for us the venue exists to
launch a lot of these careers.The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley is
available from Angry Robot on 4 April.I wrote the first 40 thousand words or so using a
broad outline that included major events in each
section, and some military details and situations
that I’d come across in my research. But once I
hit that 40-thousand-word wall and stuff started
happening out of order, I got completely stuck. I
was frustrated and pissed at myself. I wanted to
figure it out on my own, but it kept breaking my
brain, and my deadline came and went.
I finally told my agent and editor that I had
no idea what to do. My agent got on the phone
with me and we worked out where the biggest
time problems were. She then broke down the
structure according to my rough outline, and her
husband – who has a Ph.D. in math – created
this complicated graph thing to run all the time
jumps through to make sure that they worked
based on the logic we’d set up for the time
travel. Then she worked those notes into the
outline, sent it back to me, and I revised that
and chunked all of the sections into an Excel
spreadsheet in chronological order first, then in
the order that Dietz actually experiences them.
I broke these out into the ‘base’ sections when
Dietz drops back out of combat, and ‘combat’
sections when the platoon is deployed.
What blew my mind is that all of this intensive
work up front... paid off. When I read the
novel all the way through for the first time, it felt
effortless. That’s how you know someone’s done
their homework, when they just make it look...
easy. Even when it’s you!Is it difficult writing a protagonist
who spends so much of the book
not understanding what’s actually
happening to them?
Strangely, no. But I think this is because I had
a lot of practice with this while writing The
Stars Are Legion, which has an amnesiac main
character. Having a character experience events
out of order – while structurally harder – was
easier having already written a book where I
needed to carefully reveal information to the
reader and the protagonist at roughly the same
time. I also took a lot of inspiration in structurally
revealing information and connections from NK
Jemisin’s book, The Fifth Season, which was a
master class in how to do this; letting the reader
realise connections about halfway through
without explicitly telling them.How did you find telling this kind
of human story in a genre that a
lot of people associate with fiction
that’s often seen as not particularly
interested in the more sensitive
aspects of human nature?BOOK CLUB
InterviewFIGHT FOR THE STARS
We talk to Kameron Hurley about her dazzling new military SF The Light Brigade
WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL088 | w w w. s c i fi n ow.co.u k