Tag: fiction

Book: Henry Lion Oldie “Invasion”

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Pavel Filatyev’s book, which was essentially an account of the first days of Russia’s war against Ukraine seen through the eyes of a Russian contract soldier. Even then, I wanted to believe that all this horror would soon be over.

But two years have already passed since Russia attacked Ukraine, and there’s still no end in sight. As a child, reading about the Great Patriotic War, I used to think that four years of that war was a whole lifetime. By that measure, Ukraine has already been at war for half a lifetime.

The initial shock has long since faded, and any hope of a quick ending is gone for good. And then a book came out by the remarkable Ukrainian authors Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky, whom all fans of sci-fi know under the pen name Henry Lion Oldie.

Both authors are from Kharkiv — a city where, before the war, Russian was heard far more often than Ukrainian, even though its residents considered themselves Ukrainian. Before the war, Oldie were seen as purely Russian-language authors. They wrote in Russian, a language they command better than most Russians do.

But on February 24, 2022, war came to their home; Russian missiles and bombs began to fall on their city. And both of them, Dmitry and Oleg, started keeping a diary.

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Book: Stanisław Lem “Solaris”

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Stanisław Lem is a classic of Polish science fiction, hugely popular among Russian-speaking readers since the Soviet era, when we weren’t exactly spoiled for science fiction. Apparently that very status is what kept me from writing a review of Solaris for so long—because, shame on me, I only read it recently.

If Lem himself is a star, then Solaris is probably one of his most famous works—yet most people who know it do so through its screen adaptations. The best known is the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Soviet actors Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. In 2002 the Americans made their own version too: Soderbergh cast none other than George Clooney in the lead. And there was also an earlier TV adaptation with Vasily Lanovoy, released four years before Tarkovsky’s version.

It’s worth noting that Lem himself treated the adaptations of this novel rather coolly, because, first, he couldn’t imagine how it could be filmed at all—and second, he really disliked the way directors chose to reinterpret his idea. He even quarreled with Tarkovsky, calling him a fool, and later said that instead of Solaris, Tarkovsky had made “Crime and Punishment in space.”

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Book: Pavel Sanaev “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard”

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Bury Me Behind the Baseboard by Pavel Sanaev was, for many years, a bit like Pasternak was for Soviet citizens. Meaning: I hadn’t read it, but I’d heard so much about it from all sides that, deep down, I didn’t even want to read it—I “disapproved” along with everyone else.

But the years went by. The book kept coming up, stage adaptations were made, and it even got a screen version with fantastic actors. So at some point I decided you can’t judge a book based on third-hand retellings.

Pavel Sanaev is the son of the actress Yelena Sanaeva, whom most people know as Alice the Fox from the film The Adventures of Buratino. He’s also the stepson of actor and director Rolan Bykov (a name that really needs no introduction). And he’s the grandson of the famous actor Vsevolod Sanaev (he appeared in all sorts of films, but Belarusians probably know him best as Fedos in White Dew).

And Bury Me Behind the Baseboard is a slightly fictionalized set of the author’s memories of his childhood. The names have been changed, but overall he’s simply telling the story of how he lived—separated from his mother—under the care of his grandmother, and to some extent his grandfather too.

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Book: Boris Akunin “The Pit”

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I haven’t read all of Boris Akunin’s work, but I’ve read a fairly substantial part of it—enough to say that the series about Erast Fandorin is probably the most significant thing the author has come up with so far.

And so, when the hero’s life path started nearing its end, true fans were very saddened. The thing is, in my view the later books in the series fell far short of the first ten. Still, they were bought and read as soon as they came out. And when it seemed like Erast Petrovich was finished once and for all, first there was Just Masa, telling the story of his constant companion, and then suddenly The Pit came out, bringing back the wonderful detective himself.

The narrative throws us into a time when Fandorin is still a long way from death, but in Russia he’s already persona non grata, so he makes his living investigating cases in Europe. For example, together with Sherlock Holmes he fights Arsène Lupin. Yes, that story appeared earlier in the collection Jade Rosary Beads, and now the author takes us back to the very end of that investigation to tell us what happened next to our heroes.

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Book: Olga Gromyko “Cyber Vacation”

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So the As*trobiologists series has hit a kind of anniversary, because Cyber Vacation is already the tenth (!!!) book in the series. And the further it goes, the more Olga Gromyko focuses on characters who, in the earlier books, only flickered in the background. Though you can’t really call Roger Sakai—now a police officer, formerly a buccaneer of the space seas—a truly second-rate character.

No, Roger was practically the main antagonist at the very beginning of the whole story. And after becoming a cop (well, who can catch pirates better than an ex-pirate?), he also popped up in the adventures that followed.

The new book is, on the one hand, a collection of novellas, each with its own small story—and on the other hand, one investigation that our dashing Roger has to carry out.

In fact, he came to the planet Cassandra—populated mostly by sentient cyborgs—not for work at all. He was planning to spend a pre-wedding vacation here, but at the last moment his fiancée couldn’t make it. So Roger goes looking for something to do, so he doesn’t just sit around twiddling his thumbs out of boredom.

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Book: J.K.Rowling, John Tiffany & Jack Thorne “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”

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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is, first, a play—and second, it was written with J. K. Rowling’s involvement, but still not by her alone. Both of those facts affect the way it’s presented. A play doesn’t really need vivid descriptions or direct access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. You can’t show all that directly on stage; interpretation is the job of a specific director and a specific production. And having two co-writers as well also makes a difference.

Chronologically, the story begins almost exactly where the last novel of the main series ended—where, in the epilogue, we were shown the now-grown-up Harry, Hermione, and Ron seeing their children off to Hogwarts. Among them is Harry’s second son, Albus Severus Potter.

Up to this point, I hadn’t written reviews of any Harry Potter book. I mean, why would I, when tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people have read them already, so everyone knows what they are and what they’re about. But with this play I decided to make an exception.

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Book: Dmitry Glukhovsky “Outpost”

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I hesitated for a long time before picking up this book, because I have mixed feelings about Dmitry Glukhovsky, shaped by his Metro series. On the one hand, it’s genuinely a very interesting concept and execution; on the other, while I liked the first novel, Metro 2033, the second—and especially the third—mostly surprised me, and even disappointed me.

And even though I’d heard plenty of feedback about Outpost, I only got around to it after the war with Ukraine began, when almost everyone started saying that Glukhovsky had “seen it all coming” back then. That’s when I got genuinely curious: what exactly was it that Dmitry Glukhovsky supposedly predicted?

The novel opens by showing us a small settlement near a bridge across the Volga, by what used to be Yaroslavl. And now this is the very border of the state. Because at some point, a war broke out in the country, the mutiny was put down, but everything beyond the Volga can no longer be called inhabitable land, since some kind of weapon made it unfit for life. And the people at the outpost on the border are tasked with watching this single route into the cursed lands—just in case, so that no kind of nastiness crawls out of there.

And the lion’s share of the first volume is taken up by a description of life in this settlement—the remnants of all of Yaroslavl, where, judging by the description, only a few dozen residents are left alive, scraping by, somehow living, and even raising children. But the way this everyday grind is described, in my opinion, is drawn out too much. The plot moves very slowly, and all these abundant domestic details feel depressing at first.

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Book: Robert A. Heinlein “Orphans of the Sky”

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Well, since we’re on a classics streak, after the Soviet Those Who Survive it’s time to talk about Robert A/ Heinlein’s novel Orphans of the Sky.

Originally, the book was written as two separate parts, published independently as novellas in Astounding Science Fiction magazine back in 1941: Universe and Common Sense. Only twenty years later, in 1963, were the two novellas published together as a single work under the title Orphans of the Sky. Russian readers know the book as Stepsons of the Universe, as it was rendered as Stepsons by its first Russian translator, Yuri Zarakhovich.

For Soviet readers, the novel was first published in Zarakhovich’s translation in 1977 (incidentally, the year I was born), serialized across five issues of Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) magazine. I don’t know the exact reason, but for that magazine publication Zarakhovich produced an abridged translation. Nevertheless, it was this version that became the canonical one for many years and continued to be reprinted right up until 2003. Only in 2003 did a complete Russian translation of the novel appear, by Elena Belyaeva and Alexander Mityushkin. Neither of them were professional translators, yet their work still received an award. In addition to restoring the full text, they also slightly revised some terminology that had become “familiar” over decades of reprints of Zarakhovich’s version.

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Book: Kir Bulychev “Those Who Survive”

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Kir Bulychev is most often regarded as a children’s science-fiction writer. When people hear his name, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the adventures of Alisa Selezneva.

However, Kir Bulychev wrote many works that are anything but children’s literature. Among them, probably the most well-known is the novel Those Who Survive, originally published in Russian under the title Posyolok (The Settlement in English). Initially, Bulychev wrote only the first part of the story, titled The Pass, which was published as a standalone novella in 1980. Only eight years later, in 1988, he wrote the second part, Beyond the Pass, and only then did the book become a single novel known as Posyolok.

The story is built around a spaceship that crashed on a distant planet many years ago. The planet is not exactly hostile; rather, it is simply what an alien world should be — not Earth. It has its own flora and fauna, which were never meant to coexist with humans. As a result, survival is extremely difficult for the crash survivors. The entire world is against them, and after the catastrophe almost none of the technological marvels of the future remain. Those who avoided immediate death are forced to focus solely on survival in this unwelcoming environment — and even that does not always succeed.

Over the years, they have become increasingly primitive in terms of everyday life, yet they have learned how to survive. Children born on this planet know nothing of any other life; they learn about it only through lessons in the small school of the Settlement. Even those who were born before the crash were very young at the time and remember almost nothing of life “before.”

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Book: Boris Akunin “Remarkable People of Ancient Rus’”

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It feels like it wasn’t that long ago that I wrote about the final book in Boris Akunin’s nine-volume epic on the history of the Russian state — and yet here the author is launching a new cycle, which will apparently offer a different perspective on the same subject matter.

Not so long ago, Akunin wrote that he began the Russia-history cycle partly to understand how the country ended up in its current condition. And already by the third volume he had found his answer and continued to follow that line throughout the entire series (which is noticeable — though at times it feels as if he’s forcing the pieces to fit).

But why, then, did he start a new cycle, titled Illumination of History — and starting essentially from the same point as the previous one? In principle, the answer is already hinted at in the title of this first book: Remarkable People of Ancient Rus’. While narrating the history of the state, the author naturally highlighted the key players of that history. But he felt that he had not gone deep enough into them.

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