Tag: fiction

Olga Gromyko “The Cyborg and His Forester”

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Olga Gromyko continues to write about the beloved world of the near future, where seemingly kind humans have learned to create cyborgs, but ultimately treat them worse than furniture. They look like humans, but they can be casually used to clear minefields.

The main difference in the new book “The Cyborg and His Forester” is that it’s the first novel without the characters from the main series. The setting is the same, the location has appeared before, and the main characters were introduced in a previous short story. However, the beloved team from “The Space Brain-Eater” is absent from this book.

This is both good and bad, in my opinion. It’s good because Olga took a step sideways and tried to develop the universe without relying on the endless adventures of the team. She partially did this in the previous book when she shifted focus from road adventures to the fate of intelligent cyborgs finally making their voices heard.

But it’s bad because the book turned out to be less interesting and colorful. There are fewer main characters, and only two protagonists. Their color is also different. This is the first book in the series where I caught myself losing interest while reading. The main story is a light detective plot. But it didn’t captivate me like the previous books. The detective aspect is very “light,” because the relationship between the characters clearly takes precedence over the detective line. But even the main characters sometimes became tiresome with their behavior. At times, it felt like a circus, with the protagonists acting like clowns. And they seemed exhausted by it, performing this number for the ten-thousandth time, but unable to stop—because it’s their job.

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Henry Lion Oldie “The Grandson of Perseus”

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Most Soviet children of my generation were probably quite knowledgeable about Greek mythology. And we owe this to the magnificent book by Nikolai Kun, Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece. Moreover, after having spent quite a bit of time recently with real Greeks, it seems to me that we knew their mythology better than they did.

That said, even I don’t remember much now. So, what do we remember about Perseus? That he killed Medusa the Gorgon, who could turn people to stone with a single glance, and that he avoided looking at her directly by using her reflection in his shield. And that’s about the extent of my knowledge after all these years.

The same goes for many other characters. The book contained an enormous number of them, but we mostly focused on the feats of various heroes: Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, the Argonauts… That’s who was interesting. As for the rest, we left them behind. Can you remember the names of Perseus’ grandchildren? Or that he even had grandchildren? And do you know who was Heracles’ mortal father (since Zeus was his official dad)?

Well, Perseus’ grandson and Heracles’ mortal father were actually the same person—Amphitryon. It was he whom H.L. Oldie made the main character of their dilogy The Grandson of Perseus, the third book in their Achaean cycle. The first was A Hero Must Be Alone (dedicated to the story of Heracles), followed by the dilogy Odysseus, Son of Laertes. It was with the first of these that I began my acquaintance with Oldie’s books.

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Fredrik Backman “My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry”

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Fredrik Backman was my discovery of 2018. As I mentioned earlier, his novel A Man Called Ove was the best fiction book I read that year. That’s why I decided that I definitely needed to read his other books—or at least give them a try, since sometimes an author writes one exceptional work, but the rest don’t live up to it.

Backman’s second novel is intriguing from the title alone—My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. It immediately makes you curious about who this grandmother is and what she’s apologizing for.

The main character of the book is a girl named Elsa, and her grandmother is quite a character. If Ove—the hero of A Man Called Ove—believed that life should be orderly and by the rules, Elsa’s grandmother is the complete opposite. She doesn’t accept any rules or laws, and Elsa adores her for it. Partly because every night in their dreams, they fly off to the magical land of Miamas together. And her grandmother is always on the lookout for adventures. Even her final quest for her granddaughter promises many mysteries and discoveries.

The most interesting thing is that, despite my super positive attitude going in, the first part of the book didn’t flow as smoothly for me as A Man Called Ove did. With Ove, I couldn’t put it down. Here, the rhythm was different, and while the grandmother is a colorful character, there’s just so much fantasy and make-believe that she feeds to her granddaughter.

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Uladzimir Karatkevich “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt”

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It just so happens that I had never read any works by Vladimir Korotkevich (Uladzimir Karatkevich, if translated from Belarusian), even though my wife really enjoys his writing. I had been planning to for a long time, but I finally decided to start my acquaintance with the relatively short novella King Stakh’s Wild Hunt.

The novella tells the story of the main character, a collector of Belarusian folklore, who travels to distant marshy areas to find local folklore among the people. He’s kind of like Shurik from a famous Soviet film, but from an earlier time and in Belarus, not the Caucasus.

Luck smiles upon him, and he quickly learns about the legend of the Wild Hunt of King Stakh—phantom hunters who torment all the descendants of an ancient noble family. Since the last descendant is a lovely young woman, the main character decides to investigate the situation and protect the innocent victim. It’s a detective story with a blend of Belarusian motifs and constant reflections on the place of ordinary people in history. Initially, the narrative progresses slowly and measuredly, but after about a third, the pace changes, and events start to unfold more and more rapidly.

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Oleg Divov “Tech Support”

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A brand-new novel by Oleg Divov, fresh off the press, “was still running this morning.” The book Tech Support is presented as if it were a report about events that the general public is not supposed to know. Complete with all the necessary “confidential” and “approved for use” labels from the Schrodinger Institute.

The story takes place in the not-too-distant future (just a few decades ahead) when the Russians sold good-quality, but no longer cutting-edge, weaponry to an African country. Well, more accurately, they went there to sell it. And there, events took their own course, following a distinctly Russian-African trajectory.

The novel is written in a very light style, with a sense of irony and humor, generously seasoned with recklessness, nonchalance, and the typical Russian “let’s hope for the best” attitude. But it also carries a certain degree of political incorrectness that we’re familiar with: black people are called “negroes,” (which doesn’t care any negative attitude in Russian, by the way), cultural stereotypes are mocked, and so on. I can’t even imagine letting a Western audience read this novel—they’d tear it apart.

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Sergei Lukyanenko “Labyrinth of Reflections”

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At one time, Sergei Lukyanenko’s book Labyrinth of Reflections made a massive impact on the IT world, a world few people even knew about back then. It practically became the bible of that generation.

The internet was still a novelty at the time, and no one fully understood what it would become, but many geeks already had personal computers at home. Communication took place on FidoNet, where people lived, debated, and created — including Sergei Lukyanenko and most Russian sci-fi writers of that era.

In fact, the novel Labyrinth of Reflections reflects this very generation, which suddenly transitions from the Fido network to a world of virtual reality. But not the kind we see now — it was from the same era of networks and computers that seemed cutting-edge at the time but now, twenty years later, are hopelessly outdated.

The central idea and fantastical premise is that someone invented a program that puts users into a trance, making everything on the screen feel like reality, while the user understands only intellectually that they are in a constructed world — the Deep. From there, the author shows how such a discovery irreversibly changes the world.

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Boris Akunin “Sister Pelagia”

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I really love Boris Akunin’s series about Erast Fandorin. The last few books were less interesting, but I’ve reread the early novels in the series several times. However, I had always kept the trilogy about Sister Pelagia “on the back burner.” In fact, I read the first book, Pelagia and the White Bulldog, about 6-7 years ago, but back then I had no desire to continue with the series. Now, I’ve decided to correct this, so I reread the first book and then went on to read the other two.

The most interesting part is that you can’t really say that Sister Pelagia is the main character of the series. Yes, everything revolves around her, and she’s a sort of local detective. But I’d say there are several key characters, including Pelagia, the metropolitan, and a few other residents of the town of Zavolzhsk, where the events take place.

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Nate Kenyon “Spectres”

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spectres

This time, I’ll start from a bit farther back — why a book from the StarCraft series in the first place.

The term “novelization” for games refers to a fictional work created based on a video game. I never used to think novelizations could be interesting, even though it’s a very popular and widespread genre.

However, I once became so fascinated with the StarCraft universe that I couldn’t resist when I saw the first novelizations based on it. At that time, they weren’t available in Russian, so I bought the original English versions, hoping that someday I would be able to read them. When I opened the first page of the first book — Liberty’s Crusade — an even crazier idea struck me: to translate it into Russian. I spent almost two years working on the translation, but I finished it. Moreover, it was published by the Azbuka publishing house, and it became the first book from this universe available in Russian.

Looking back, I now feel a bit embarrassed by this amateur translation, with its fair share of mistakes, and the publisher’s editor added some of their own content without consulting me. However, this project gave me a huge boost in learning English, and after that, reading books in the original language didn’t seem so difficult.

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Fredrik Backman “A Man Called Ove”

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I’ll start with the strong points. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman is the best piece of fiction I’ve read in at least the last five years. I didn’t even know about this author until my wife recommended the book to me, saying, “Read it, it’s about you.”

Fredrik Backman is a Swedish writer who started out as a truck driver, then began writing articles for a newspaper, eventually opened his own blog… and later wrote the novel A Man Called Ove about a character who first appeared in his blog. And his life changed. The novel became popular, was adapted into a film in Sweden, and was later nominated for an Oscar. After that, Fredrik Backman continued writing, and his subsequent novels are also said to be very good.

The book tells the story of a simple man, Ove, and begins on the day he retires. No, Ove isn’t exactly a simple man. He’s a person with very straightforward views on life (compared to many others), yet he has a strong backbone and firm beliefs. Beliefs so firm that they can lead him to fight for justice through official channels for years, or refuse to speak to a neighbor for twenty years because of them.

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Boris Akunin “The Walnut Buddha”

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The latest book in the fictional subseries History of the Russian State in Novels and Stories is a supplement to the volume about Tsar Peter the Great and consists of just one main novella. As with all of Akunin’s books, the writing style is very light — I practically “devoured” the entire novella. But as for the content… I liked the documentary volume about the tsar less than the earlier ones in the series, and this novella didn’t turn out to be much better.

There are interesting characters here, but the author doesn’t allow them to fully develop. Moreover, the novella is more about Japanese Buddhist teachings than about the era of Peter the Great. It’s a story about a “path” with a lowercase ‘p’ and the “Path” with an uppercase ‘P’. With lessons on how one should live and what is most important in life.

As for the events taking place and the country and time period through which this path unfolds… that’s all not particularly important.

It was an interesting read, but it feels like Akunin forcefully tied it to Peter’s era.

My rating: 3/5