![]() Her left arm was an organic-machine hybrid, and she walked with a hitch in her step. She wore a shit-brick of military honors on her jacket. She must have been fifty or so, though it was hard to tell, with half her face scarred by acid or some explosion (I never asked. “What do you know about the enemy?” said Sergeant Older from the head of the classroom the next afternoon. What they must do is communicate the feeling of the story, and this cover succeeds in that.įlick the switch on our exclusive chapter excerpt below and tell us if you'll join up for the high-wattage interplanetary ride!įrom The Light Brigade with permission from Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Many science fiction covers seek to give too much away they don’t need to be literal interpretations of the text. The figure looking up and into the light, one misty hand raised either in greeting or to shield the eyes. It’s the first thing potential readers see, and it not only needs to make an impact but signal to the reader what kind of story they can expect inside. KH: For most authors, the biggest investment a publisher makes in a title’s marketing is the cover art and design. What are your feelings on the cover's eye-catching appeal and how important are memorable covers in the marketing game? ![]() I value firsthand experiences more than strategic texts, though they can complement each other. My academic background is also in war and resistance movements, and I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades immersing myself in the history of propaganda and recruitment, training and trauma, around the world and across a number of conflicts, large and small. The account of expecting more people in the recruiting office after a terrorist event, of eating the injured bird, of blowing off a civilian’s legs during a firefight, of driving trucks full of the dead, those and many more are real incidents and impressions from veterans I know that I’ve fictionalized here. KH: A number of family and friends are military veterans, and I incorporate some of their stories here. ![]() What was your research process and where did you find inspiration? There's a palpable tone of realism in the novel that places readers inside the chaos of combat. Fewer understand the psychological cost of war on a deep level. The political aspect is what most of us will see and experience from afar. They address the psychological impacts of war more than the political. Books like The Forever War and Armor were also influential. My grandfather participated in the liberation of France in World War II, and the stories he and my grandmother – who survived the occupation – told about those times had a profound influence on me and on all the work that I've done. I grew up in an extended family with a strong military tradition. I have always been a fan of military science fiction. But great science fiction stories don’t hinge on a single idea: they tend to accrue clusters of ideas that develop into a more complex novel. A technological go-between that exists between our present and the instantaneous travel of the distant future. Kameron Hurley: The Light Brigade began as a short story with a fairly simple concept: what if we transformed soldiers into beams of light to transport them across interplanetary battlefronts? Unlike instantaneous travel, it would be limited by the speed of light. What was the genesis of The Light Brigade and how did your love of the sci-fi genre influence its narrative? SYFY WIRE chatted with Hurley on the origins of her brilliant new novel, the influences that seeped into the front lines of its raw storyline of soldiers chewed up by the corporate military machine, and the extreme importance of cover design in marketing.
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