November 01, 2008

Underground Novelist

In the Soviet era, science fiction often served as a thinly-veiled vehicle for criticizing the failures of communism: writers like Ivan Yefremov or the Strugatsky brothers could send a protagonist to a distant world to criticize a utopia gone wrong; a writer could ruminate on the degradation of human values amidst the mindless pursuit of technology and progress; individuals could oppose faceless bureaucracies eerily similar to those Russian readers faced in everyday life. What is more, the accepted canon of American science fiction writers – Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein and others – offered subversively American views of the future, which might well be at odds with the bright and glorious prospects touted under communism.

As author Sergei Lukyanenko (Night Watch trilogy) recently said in an interview with Russky Reporter, “Science fiction rebelled a bit. This is primarily because writers were not allowed to think freely... The science fiction writer was not allowed to conceive of a future that was not communist. So he had to shift the action to other planets or parallel worlds, otherwise the book would not get through. Therefore, science fiction in the Soviet era often bore elements of political satire...”

The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a temporary decline in science fiction, yet the scene has been changing: the chaos of Russian democracy has been replaced by a uniParty wedded to big money and big business; mass dissent is all but outlawed, while isolated, low-volume opposition is allowed, even encouraged; political apathy and consumerism are gnawing at the fringes of the Russian soul; a gaping chasm is growing between society’s haves and have nots. “Today, the need for camouflaged speech is gone,” Lukyanenko said. “Yet science fiction still raises socially significant themes. Perhaps it is not as noticeable, because one no longer has to read between the lines.”

And so, science fiction is again on the rise. According to Knizhny Biznes, the journal of the Russian publishing world, sales of science fiction grew 30% between 2004 and 2005, to $156 million, accounting for nearly 8% of total market sales. This is four times the annual growth rate for general fiction.

Dmitry Glukhovsky is a 29-year-old TV journalist, entrepreneur, and science fiction author. He well understands that, in today’s Russia, an author must be much more than an author. A novel must be much more than a novel. So he and his partners are methodically turning his best-selling science fiction novel, Metro 2033, into an multi-faceted commercial enterprise.

“The book has been translated into Bulgarian and German and Spanish,” Glukhovsky said. “I believe negotiations are underway with Italy, France, the UK and U.S. (a chapter of the book was excerpted in issue 3 of our sister publication, Chtenia). Two computer games are being developed based on this book, one of them is from the producer of the quite famous S.T.A.L.K.E.R… and it is set to become quite a global project, originating from Moscow. Well, I can’t really see the same potential as Star Wars, but it could be something original coming from here. And negotiations are underway to screen the book, to film it, so that could also add some logs to the fire.”

Trim and self-consciously casual, Glukhovsky has the easy-going manner of a tele-journalist. Gifted with languages, he studied and worked in Israel, France and Germany and now travels frequently for his work as roving reporter for Russia Today (he covered, for example, last winter’s famous Russian sub undersea mission to the North Pole). When he is in Moscow, he also hosts a call-in radio show on Radio Mayak. Weary of his professional juggling act, he hopes the Metro franchise will set him free to write full time. “…If it can become an international project, a real one with computer games, and a picture and a sequel and so on and so on,” Glukhovsky said, “then of course I have a feeling I have to drop all the rest, because it’s not substantial, and to do what I can do best, and just go in one direction.”

The premise of Metro 2033 is simple and clever. A nuclear catastrophe has sterilized the surface of the earth and Moscow’s only survivors are those who were in the bowels of the city’s deep metro system when the bombs fell. Yet Glukhovsky – in his novel or in person – does not elaborate on the cause of the apocalypse.

“The more details you give about the situation, the less credible it tends to be over time… most books give too many preconditions, are too detailed, and then people in like two years time, five years time, 10 years time, find your forecast hasn’t justified itself... and people don’t trust the rest of the content of the book.”

Glukhovsky’s tale begins a decade after the apocalypse. Each metro station has become a village unto itself, some uniting in a communist alliance (along the metro’s red line, of course), some forming a commercial Hanseatic League (much of the Ring Line). Yet a new species has evolved that threatens this fragile subterranean world, and the novel’s hero, Artyom, must undertake a journey to spread word of this danger, so that the fractious stations can unify to defeat the greater outside threat.

“Metro is not a book about nuclear war and mutants and monsters and fighting monsters…” Glukhovsky explained. “It is rather a book about finding your own place in this world, defining and understanding your mission and trying to understand whether human beings have a mission. It’s about the sense in which we are called to something in this world…”

Glukhovsky began writing Metro 2033 over a decade ago, when he was living and studying in Europe. He submitted the novel to several Russian publishers, but was repeatedly rejected. So he did what you would expect any aspiring young writer to do: he built a web site.

“At first,” Glukhovsky recalled, “all the editors and publishers just refused to publish the book, because they said that it wasn’t particularly interesting and the ending wasn’t a conventional one, let’s say. So, instead of committing suicide and going into complete despair, I decided to publish it myself on the web, for free. I made a website and I published all the text there… and I spread a couple of links on all the forums of the science fiction amateurs and metro fans and so on.”

Teasing readers along by letting out one chapter at a time, Glukhovsky built a huge online fan base. And he also got loads of pre-publication feedback from readers.

“There were lots of people really much more into this issue than me,” he said. “Like the metro train drivers and the professional military, who criticized me for describing the Kalashnikov [rifle] incorrectly, how it shoots and fires and so on. Because I am not a professional, I’m just an author. So what could I know? I did some research, of course… but they made lots of corrections and editing for me, like they’re saying, ‘You know the flame-thrower doesn’t work like that, and if you try to use it in the tunnel, it’s you who will be the first to die.’ Okay, so I’m not going to use the flamethrower in this chapter. These kinds of things.”

Interestingly, his fans also convinced him to change the story’s ending (in which the hero died). The online book morphed into print, and it has sold over 200,000 copies in the last year. Bettina Nibbe, Glukhovsky’s agent, said that English language rights to the book have been sold to Orion and it is likely the book will be released in the U.S. in late 2009. Rights to create a computer game based on the book have been sold to a U.S. developer.

Glukhovsky clearly sees his author-entrepreneur role and indeed his authorial voice in a more global cast. “I am not sure that I am quite Russian in my style,” he said, “if Russian, then only subconsciously, in the style and the writing and the language, and so on, in the metaphors. Because I am trying to be rather [Gabriel Garcia] Marques or [Umberto] Eco than Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Turgenev or whoever…

“For me good taste in a book is when a story has a message, or best of all a couple of messages. It has to make you think. It has to make you share your ideas. It has to provoke. And when you turn the last page of the book, you have to think about it. If the book doesn’t make you think, it’s not worthy to write it at all…”

The author’s subterranean imaginings, paired with his journalistic fame, have gained him some valuable contacts. He uses one to gain us khalyava access to a nondescript, square yellow building on a quiet side street in southeast Moscow. The building’s seeming insignificance is a ruse: 65 meters (22 stories) below the surface is a secret, Soviet-era communication bunker known as GO-42, or Tagansky Command Center.

We leave our passports with two thick-necked guards in short blue shop coats that are breast-embroidered with bright gold lettering: SMERSH. It’s the Cold War acronym for the Soviet counterespionaage group created and named by Stalin, based on the abbreviation of the Russian words smert shpionam – death to spies.

Glukhovsky explains that GO-42 was “one of more than 100 secret bunkers belonging to the government, to the ministries… linked to the Moscow Metro stations, turning the Moscow Metro into a giant web, a giant network, linking all the bunkers, all the storage, and all the protected command centers, all of them being a huge underground shelter… as the world’s biggest anti-nuclear shelter, to protect Muscovites and also the government structures, the command, some of the military and the KGB officers in the case of nuclear attack.”

GO-42 functioned until 1991 as a nuclear bunker, maintained by the Central Telegraph Agency. Purportedly capable of withstanding a 350-kiloton nuclear explosion within 300 meters (thanks partly to the nine-meter-thick concrete “lid” which sits atop the bunker inside the fake façade), it was built in 1954 and for 30 years the 7,000 square meter facility was staffed around the clock by 600 workers (it kept enough supplies on hand to support 2,500 workers for 90 days) as a back-up command bunker in the event the main communications bunker should be destroyed.

“The depth at which all the Moscow metro stations lie is explained by the fact that they were meant to protect the population from nuclear attack,” Glukhovsky continues. “Because you would never find such depth in New York for example, or Paris, or London, or any other city where you can find an underground. It is only in Moscow or other Soviet cities where the depth is up to 100 meters… some part of the population will survive, because of the depth and the unique construction of the metro stations…. They say it was from here in 1962 that they called off Soviet missiles from Cuba.”

As we step onto a boxy four-person elevator like those in every Soviet-built apartment complex, our soft-voiced guide apologizes: “Now we are having some constructions. We are sorry for all the strange smell, and many strange people.” By which he means the acrid oil-based paints and the glowering Caucasian day laborers that await us 22 stories below.

The bunker fell into disuse in the 1980s, as the nuclear threat waned, and in the 1990s was completely neglected, becoming a popular destination for renegade “digger” groups. In May 2006, it was bought at a public auction for R65 million by Novik Service, an obscure private company from the city of Eysk. Which led to jokes: “Vasya, when I said I wanted you to purchase 10,000 square meters of space in Moscow, this is not what I had in mind!”

Today, renovations are well underway and the company rents the complex out for private functions, seeking to convert this subterranean relic into a museum for Cold War buffs.

Scattered crews of laborers clean and paint the nine-meter-wide cylindrical chambers and its narrower connecting tunnels. We examine a scale model of the bunker, alongside a collection of Cold War memorabilia, navigate dank passageways, then are ushered into a narrow tunnel reeking of wet paint. Our mumbling guide props plywood up against the lit entrance and suddenly the lights go out.

Air raid sirens scream, followed by the sound of explosions. An echoing, incomprehensible voice seems to proclaim that the state is under nuclear attack and that several multi-megaton bombs have fallen on Moscow region. But then the lights hurriedly return, the plywood barrier is removed, and we are reminded that the greatest danger we face in the bunker is leaning up against the wet red paint of the walls.

glukhovsky did not visit GO-42 until after his book was written: his publisher held Metro 2033‘s book release party here. And he does not look to be turning his back on the Metro franchise any time soon. A sequel – Metro 2034 – will be released next spring. Yet it will be Glukhovsky’s third book. His second, Twilight, came out in 2008 and has sold 100,000 copies, he said, despite a high retail price of $15. A work of magical realism and historical fiction which critics have compared to The Da Vinci Code, like Metro 2033, it takes place under the cloud of apocalypse. Yet perhaps this is not surprising. For, despite his success as a science fiction author, Glukhovsky, like many young Russians, feels a sense of uncertainty and foreboding.

“I believe it is a topic that is very interesting and close to every Russian, because with all the sudden prosperity after a decade of complete collapse and limbo, you get a sense that it’s not for real, it’s gonna end soon…” Glukhovsky said. “It can’t be so good for a long time. We’ve got 100 years of complete crap, and disaster and totalitarian rule and wars and famine, and the next minute everything is going right?… It can’t be for real. It’s gonna end soon. Do I have an Audi? No, it’s not possible. Someone is going to come and take it. If not, then an earthquake will completely destroy Moscow and the world’s gonna end.”

Sounds like a promising plot for a novel… RL

November 01, 2008

Underground Novelist

See Also

Video of Moscow Communications Bunker

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