It might be a high-action, high-concept sci fi military thriller, but it’s also a dare to think. From the blasted wastelands created by climate change to pervasive surveillance tech, from limited social, political, and economic rights for certain groups to the criminal immorality of unconstrained corporate greed, this is a book for our time. There’s certainly no leaving this with any misapprehensions about the dichotomy between powerful/powerless, part of a thoroughly cutting commentary on contemporary society as much as this future Earth. Financial gain as the bottom line means anything goes, anything and anyone. And that means more power, more influence, more money. After all, it might offer some kind of advantage in the war. The so-called Light Brigade are disappearing at an alarming rate, but Dietz is something special, and the corp brass want to know what Dietz knows.

The rest of us have to learn.’ It’s not hard to work out why a military-industrial-ruling corporation might want that as a foundation for their soldiers, but it becomes ever more important when people start coming back from drops knowing more than they should. But cold, calculated killing? Only one percent of people are psychopaths. If they do, it’s in a fit of rage or madness. ‘You want to gouge the eyes of a stranger? You tried it? How did that go? Hardly anybody does that shit. Soldiers are brutalised, de-humanised, trained to kill without hesitation and more importantly, without question. There’s no holding back on the processes of indoctrination and control, a ruthless system with one aim, and it becomes increasingly clear that it’s not the one they signed up for. The promise of a slightly better life for themselves and their family offered as a meagre carrot to balance the very big stick of sickness, starvation, death. The corps are the purest example, supplied by an endless stream of people with few options. Choice is a freedom open only to citizens and even then it’s mostly illusion. People are little more than cogs in the machine, their only worth seen through the lens of their potential use to the corporations. If it seems more like a what if, than a when…well, take a better look around. Now they're fighting their own wars, against each other as much as the apparent Martian threat.

But what if the only way out of this unending war is lost somewhere in the welter of bloody, confusing images? What if the truth is something only Dietz can discover? This is a world controlled by corporations, giant multi-national companies which have supplanted governments but perpetuate the very worst of their combined aspects. Out of sync with fellow grunts and increasingly uncertain about what or when’s real, Dietz is starting to attract the wrong kind of attention. Being broken down into particles of light and beamed off-planet, propelled from one hot zone to another, watching comrades die from drops gone bad even before the fighting starts….all this is grim enough, but Dietz is experiencing it all wrong. The corps have got their own revolutionary tech, a way of moving armies across space. All that’s left now is revenge, so Dietz signs up for the corporate military, the best way to take the fight to those responsible: Mars. But the proof is in the absence of millions of souls, a whole city disappeared. Nobody thought anything like that could happen, nobody knew tech like that existed. Dietz’s family were destroyed in the Blink, wiped out in an instant.

The light brigade book