Tag: science-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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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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Nate Kenyon “Spectres”

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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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Alexey Pehov, Elena Bychkova, Natalya Turchaninova “Kindrat”

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I really love Alexey Pehov’s work. For me, he’s already become a kind of personal brand — I buy any new book of his as soon as it comes out, even if I don’t plan on reading it right away. My wife and I have different opinions on which of his books is the best. As for his collaborations with Elena Bychkova and Natalya Turchaninova, I had only read a few novellas and stories before, and over ten years ago, I started the vampire series Kindrat.

I say “started” because, at the time, only the first volume had been published. I read it, but it seemed weaker to me than Alexey’s other solo works (yes, I know they’re not exactly solo). So, for many years, the books from that series were left on the shelf.

But recently, I decided to give the series a second chance, especially since the topic of vampires has always interested me. Since I have a peculiar memory for books, I began by re-reading the first volume. Interestingly, my feelings about it remained exactly the same after ten years. But now I didn’t have to wait for the second volume to be released, so I started reading it right away. And you know what? It worked. The pacing of the narrative changed dramatically, the “annoying” moments from the first book disappeared… and in the end, I read the entire series with great pleasure.

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Neil Gaiman “American Gods”

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The novel American Gods had been on my radar for a long time; the synopsis seemed intriguing. But for some reason, I never got around to reading it. Then, out of the blue, the Americans started adapting it into a TV series, and the book began getting advertised everywhere again. Several acquaintances read it, my wife too… so I had no choice.

I read the novel fairly quickly but took a long time to gather my thoughts to write a detailed opinion. I rated it right away, but as to why—that required some reflection.

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Olga Gromyko “As*troheads: Nearby”

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The book “As*troheads: Nearby” by Olga Gromyko is the sixth in the “As*troheads” series. Like the previous book in the cycle, “As*troheads: Before, Between, After“, this two-volume set is another collection of novellas and short stories.

However, I’ve noticed some clear differences. The works in the previous book were loosely connected: two novellas were tied by events, but the rest were simply sketches about beloved characters, some of which didn’t even qualify as full-fledged stories—just brief jokes on the theme.

In “As*troheads: Nearby”, there is a clear chronology of events, and many of the novellas and stories continue from previous ones in the same book. But the most important difference is that this collection introduces a new overarching theme.

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Olga Gromyko “As*troheads: Before, Between, After”

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“As*troheads” (earlier versions known as “As*trobiologists”) is the second long-running series by Belarusian writer Olga Gromyko. Her first series, about a witch, brought Olga recognition and a dedicated fanbase. Since then, she has written standalone books and smaller series, but “As*troheads” has been around for over six years, and the adventures of the characters are far from over (in fact, a new two-volume edition was just released).

The book “As*troheads: Before, Between, After” is the fifth in the series, but chronologically, it spans across various points in time, as the title suggests. It’s not a single narrative but rather a collection of novellas and short stories that cover events from before the first book to after the fourth.

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Keith R. A. DeCandido “Serenity”

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I am a big fan of ‘Firefly’ series and ‘Serenity’ movie as well. But this particular novel is mostly just a novelization of the ‘Serenity’ movie. Yes, it definitely gives you more inner emotions and thoughts of characters than a movie can do. But still it is just a text version of the story you know (if you watched the movie), slightly adopted screenplay, I guess.

The novel is good for fans, and I even want to re-watch the original series after that, but really don’t expect a lot here.