“Let me tell you how they break you,” says Dietz, a young soldier with a number of regrets, describing the grim reality behind a dream of military glory. “From the minute you step off the transport at the training base . . . you aren’t doing anything right. You don’t walk right, look right, talk right . . . No one likes you, let alone loves you. In great shape? It’s not enough. Smart? That’s worse.” Within a week, the victim of this treatment is fundamentally changed: “You yearn to kill, because it’s the only thing that gets your DI to love you. When you withhold all praise, people will do anything to get it. They’ll eat each other, if they need to.” For you English majors out there, the thrum of Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the title of Kameron Hurley’s latest is as intentional as you’d expect, but you may be more immediately reminded of his embittered successors Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The characters, no older than the youths of WWI’s trenches, have ample material for a lifetime of shellshock before they’re out of basic training. Within three chapters they’re bonding over a bout of deadly illness caused by the medical treatments that the battlefield of the future demands. “When you’re running, shitting and vomiting,” Dietz notes wryly, “it puts you in touch with the fact that you’re just a bag of guts.”

The Light Brigade has the kind of gimmick memorable enough to stick in the mind after a glance at the jacket flap—at war with a terrorist colony on Mars, Earth has solved the problem of interstellar travel by transforming its soldiers into light, enabling them to “drop” from Earth to a distant planet at light speed. It would be easy to hang an entire novel on the strength of this conceit, with its blazing metaphorical resonances (“Nobody ever thinks they chose the wrong side,” says Dietz, on whom these are not lost. “We all think we’re made of light.”) and its attendant drawbacks, which would do Cronenberg proud (the human components sometimes reconfigure in the wrong order, and a dropper who remains intact still runs the risk of materializing underground or inside a solid structure). Instead, Hurley uses it as the starting point for an old-fashioned tale of time displacement. It becomes quickly apparent that for Dietz, the “drops” are happening in the wrong order, shuffling the young recruit all over the longer timeline of the war from one drop to the next. As complicated as this device may seem, it works because it remains fully in service to a story about war and its human cost. Dietz’s disorientation (how much time has really passed?) feels as much a reaction to the routine horror of combat as the confusion of an accidental time-traveler. The wider cast, though intriguing and full of individual quirks, never come through for the reader in the way Dietz does, with good reason. The isolation inherent to living out events in the wrong sequence forcibly evokes the isolation of active duty.

While Hurley leaves several character elements to be unwound with the story—blink and you’ll miss the fleeting mention of the protagonist’s gender—there is nothing coy about The Light Brigade. At times, the author’s bloody-minded determination to deliver the message (itself a strength; you can hear the frustration of the veteran, or maybe of the teenager) risks turning the story into a lecture, most noticeably in a subplot composed of transcribed conversations with a prisoner of war who monologues like a Bond villain. At its best, however, Hurley’s verb-laden first-person is as immediate and inescapable as a resounding sock in the jaw. At nearly 400 pages, The Light Brigade nonetheless goes down quickly, which is just as well—the nonlinear plot will have you calculating when to fit the reread in.

Charlie Jane Anders hurls her latest book, The City in the Middle of the Night, against the boundary of imagination with her strange, beautiful alien world. Anders re-maps modern English onto new science fiction concepts and creatures, and begins the novel with a fictional translator’s note alerting the read that the text of The City in the Middle of the Night will use well known creatures and terms in lieu of the alien, helping to ease the jump into a world wildly different from our own. In theory, this seems wild and confusing but in practice, Anders’ stylistic chocie helps the reader understand the strange lives led on the planet January. Crocodiles are definitely not crocodiles, I would not suggest trying to ride their cats, and most food is likely nothing like its terrestrial counterpart.

One side of January permanently faces the local star and one side faces entirely away. A thin band of land between “day” and “night” provides a barely hospitable patch for the human colonists. In this narrow band of life, humans struggle to regulate their sleep and wakefulness. When inadvertent revolutionary Sophie is banished into the bleak wilderness outside her city, her life is saved by the mysterious aliens who roam January’s surface and what she learns from them may change the planet’s society forever.

Time is a key theme of Anders’ novel—the human settlements visited by the two main characters, Sophie and Mouth, are defined by how they structure life around the endless dusk. Anders masterfully constructs both settings, using her protagonists’ reaction to the flow of time in each city to paint a different kind of claustrophobia. I never thought I would describe a book as painting a story entirely in different shades of anxiety, but Anders nails the feelings of claustrophobia, fear of acceptance, inferiority and loss of identity all in the span of 360 pages.

No character in the story is “likeable,” but all of them are incredibly relatable. The awkward relationship between Sophie and her best friend/love interest, Mouth’s aggressively territorial protection and ownership of her birth culture, and several other character specific conflicts are handled with tact and painful accuracy. My interest in continuing the story hinged completely on the intricate setpieces and the air of mystery surrounding the alien life on January—on both points, Anders overdelivers.

The City in the Middle of the Night does not end cleanly, and perhaps it’s fitting that a story so well grounded in realistic and relatable protagonists ends with such an unsatisfying tilt. In this novel, Anders has lovingly crafted a unique world, and finishes with a wild twist that left me endlessly interested in the next book of the series.

After being violently apprehended by mercenaries, Ada von Hasenberg’s mind is already sorting through her options for escape as she’s dragged along spaceship corridors toward an uncertain end. As the fifth daughter of one of the vast Consortium’s most powerful Houses, she’s managed to survive for two years on the run from her fate as a political pawn destined for a strategic marriage. But even with the skills and resources she’s acquired as a fugitive among the stars, her father’s enormous bounty for her capture has finally brought Ada to heel.

In the dark confines of her captors’ brig, Ada finds her last chance to escape may be hanging in chains on the opposite wall. Notorious across the systems as the Devil of Fornax Zero, her cellmate Marcus Loch represents both certain danger and potential salvation. United by the knowledge that they each face a different kind of doom, they combine talents in a dangerous bid for freedom. Despite an instant physical attraction between them, Ada fears she’s hitching her getaway hopes on a killer, and Loch knows his escape might be complicated by the company of this tempting fugitive scion.

Sprinting from planet to planet on stolen transports as they scrabble for resources and allies, Ada and Loch accidentally discover technology that rival Houses would kill to possess. The pair’s path to freedom evolves as they struggle to unravel the tech’s mysteries before the Consortium erupts into war. In their quest for answers, the revelation of a shared enemy in their pursuer binds Ada and Loch closer. But the vast difference between their individual motives may send their smoldering romance up in flames.

An independent woman with powerful self-knowledge, Ada’s story is free of “rescued princess” tropes that can diminish a space opera. In a refreshing turn, Mihalik doesn’t compromise the action with a constant sexual undercurrent, but rather allows Ada and Loch to revel together in singular moments that perfectly punctuate the novel’s high energy pacing. The erotic elements are written with an economy that lets sex be sex, without an excess of emotional angst or contrived foreplay. The romance is raw, spare and more powerful for it.

Along with her remarkable world building, Mihalik introduces rich supporting characters that are deftly drawn into both the running battles as well as the layered political intrigue. With Ada and Loch’s future unclear and the fate of worlds hanging in the balance, Polaris Rising sets a magnificent stage for Mihalik’s next installment in the Consortium Rebellion trilogy.