Last year, I wrote about Oleg Divov’s book Tech Support, and this year its sequel, Tech Support: Dead Zone, was released.
A brief summary of the events in the first book: In the not-too-distant future, the Russians decided to sell a prototype walker in Africa as a highly valuable piece of military equipment. But during the pre-sale demonstration, things didn’t go as planned, a small revolution broke out, and an ordinary marketer, Lyokha Filimonov, unexpectedly found himself in the middle of combat operations that supposedly weren’t even happening—no one actually knew what was going on. That’s why this ambiguous conflict was dubbed a “Schrödinger’s war.”
The ending of the first book was left open, clearly suggesting a sequel, so I wasn’t at all surprised when the second book came out. However, it doesn’t continue the events of the first book but presents a new story. The main character, Alexey Filimonov, remains the same, but now he’s no longer a marketer; he’s an employee of the not-so-secret Schrödinger Institute, whose headquarters are located on the alluring island of Cyprus (it’s nice to learn that the place where you live is depicted as almost a paradise in the future, attracting people even from the USA).
What exactly Lyokha does at the Institute is unclear, but the Institute itself studies military conflicts, and its employees sometimes travel to conflict zones to investigate more thoroughly. This book begins with Lyokha, part of a three-person team, arriving in Nigeria to understand what sort of strange local war took place and why two PMCs (private military companies) suddenly started to destroy each other. There are far more secrets and ambiguities here than in the first book.
The novel is written in “third person,” as games now describe it—not from the main character’s perspective, but as if from over his shoulder. We follow the story wherever Lyokha Filimonov goes. He’s still a pretty minor figure, though now he’s part of the Institute. And here, I see one of the problems with the second book: no one else can figure out what’s going on, but Lyokha somehow gets lucky, and knowledge just falls into his lap. It’s not as though he collects this information bit by bit, analyzing it to build a hidden picture. Overall, it’s just told to him. One person tells him, another adds more, and a third piles on some extra details… But why him? Why can’t all the other smart characters figure it out?
Overall, the book is much poorer in terms of events. In the first, there was drive; something was always happening. The second one feels more like a “sealed-room mystery,” as Boris Akunin once described one of his novels, though there’s no actual mystery here. Lyokha just wanders around, drinks constantly, and incidentally acquires useful knowledge. And even at the end, when it seems that action is finally about to unfold, all of it happens off-screen.
Furthermore, the second book lacks the color of the first. There was the wonderfully unflappable Russian consul Tyomkin, but even more memorable was the African prince, “Vasya the Black.” I really missed Vasya here. He alone was worth ten of any other characters.
And there’s nothing about the bio-modified people from San-Escobar mentioned in the first book. Maybe it’s a setup for the future.
As a sequel, it’s readable. It offers an interesting view of how events unfold (and indeed are unfolding) that few people know the truth about, while the world is fed the preferred version and image. But to me, the book seemed weaker than the first.
My rating: 3/5
