A comparison of Hurley’s The Light Brigade and Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay. AKA: Why we prefer our political stories to have more story in them. Significant spoilers for both novels. 1/21
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These two stories wear their political values on their sleeves. They are both blatantly anti-fascist, detailing the many horrors of totalitarianism and state violence. 2/21
Light Brigade’s authoritarians are distinctly corporate, while Alien Clay features The Mandate, an organization whose roots are somewhat vague despite all the info dumping. 3/21
Speaking of info dumping, that's the critical difference between these stories. Light Brigade bakes its message into the narrative. We follow Dietz, a young woman drafted into the slaughter of corporate wars, someone kept too ignorant and impoverished to know any better. 4/21
In comparison, Alien Clay feels like an essay with the bare minimum of story needed to be shelved in the fiction aisle. Professor Daghdev is sent to a labor camp on an alien world, which should be a harrowing experience. 6/21
But the first person narration is so distant that even when terrible things directly happen to Daghdev, it rarely seems important. The narration is too concerned with long explanations of how The Mandate works. Specifically, how it infiltrates resistance against it. 7/21
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