The paths of creativity are inscrutable. That a book, or rather a saga, ends up taking on another dimension and reaching the whole world in its video game version has something of creative sublimation. The point is that in the fruitful relationship everyone wins, the books because more people come to them and the videogames because they find a rich plot for developers to stage with such a powerful script.
The ultimate beneficiary is Dmitry Glukhovsky who goes from a science fiction writer to a benchmark in an increasingly powerful video game industry, always looking for plots like his to catch players fascinated with the proposal.
Strictly literary, Dmitry's novels transfer the usual post-apocalyptic scenarios made in the USA to the other side of the world. Moscow as a redoubt of the last humans facing a new hostile world, marked by famine and that forced anarchy that always comes when everything known ends up plunged into human self-destruction. At times with shades of World War Z Transferred to an even more sinister future, Metro offers a dark imaginary of humanity delivered to the underworld.
That as for the Metro saga, interspersing in his bibliography many other stories in which Dmitry persists in his ideology of a world on the edge, a transformed, disruptive, uchronic planet. That's where Dmitry moves like a fish in water, dragging all the rest of us...
Top 3 recommended novels by Dmitry Glukhovsky
future
And yet we are going to start with a novel without prequels or sequels, a work that leads us towards that world that is already cited in first-dimensional scientific gossip. Immortality, the ability of man to overcome time. Not like "The Immortals" but science through. Let's delve into this overwhelming proposal that has that aftertaste of the movie "In Time", where money determines the right to live more or less...
In the XNUMXth century, humanity has achieved immortality thanks to living water, the vital water that is distributed free of charge among the population of the United Europe. Death no longer exists, but overpopulation has limited some resources, such as air and space.
In such a world, when a person wants to have a child, they must give themselves an injection of old age in order to die and make room for their successor. Naturally, there are those who try to have children clandestinely and preserve immortality. The Falange is the police organization in charge of persecuting these dissidents.
Yan is one of the Immortals, as members of the Phalanx are also known. One day he receives a singular assignment: to assassinate the number two of a clandestine political formation that fights for the right of citizens to have children freely.
Metro 2033
At the beginning of this novel, its easy transfer to the video game world is soon understood. Subway stations as isolated and dark spaces, units where each small group of humans has to survive adapting to ad hoc rules that are not always fair. But it is that up there is worse. On the surface, disaster awaits in the form of other beings yearning for flesh that is still fully human...
Year 2033 in Moscow. Not so far, right?... What remains of civilization resists in the last refuge. The year is 2033. After a devastating war, large parts of the world have been buried under rubble and ash.
Also Moscow has been transformed into a ghost town. The survivors have taken refuge underground, in the subway network, and have created a new civilization there. A civilization unlike any that had existed before. This book narrates the adventures of young Artjom, a boy who leaves the subway station where he has spent a good part of his life to try to protect the entire network against a sinister threat. Because these last men are not alone in the underground...
Outpost
Breaking a bit with the fascinating Metro series, but confirming that the entire series maintains the level of its start, and even improves it by complementing it with new subplots, we address here this other proposal, similar but at the same time novel.
It may be that at some point the matter will connect with Metro. Or it may even be that everything is a course of parallel worlds that at some point have a tangential encounter. The thing is, going up to the surface to see what's left after a nuclear disaster is always good. You may not see the sunlight but at least we can walk among the remains of what we were in search of some hope.
We are in the Russia that will exist in the near future. Young Yegor hardly remembers the world before the catastrophe. He has lived since his childhood in a military post on the eastern border of his country, from which he watches over a bridge that crosses the poisoned Volga River. No one has crossed the bridge for several decades… but that is about to change…
