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Loading... Yellow Blue Tibia (original 2009; edition 2009)by Adam Roberts
Work InformationYellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts (2009)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Didn't really care for this. The tone straddles satire and realism, which made me very uncertain about how to feel about the novel's pack of oddball antihero characters. Maybe just Not My Thing. ( ) I was scouting for an entertaining read, my husband suggested this book. We both enjoy Adam Roberts, but interestingly, we seem to divide them between us: he reads some, I read some. We have all of his works, and there are still one or two that neither of us have read them...but we will.... I’ve probably said it before but Adam Roberts never writes the same book twice. The breadth of his imagination is a delight and his work generally takes one’s brain on a field trip of sorts, and this book is no different. It is Russian, 1946, the war is over, i and Stalin has gathered together a group of science fiction writers and tasks them with inventing a ‘new enemy’ something that will keep Communism cohesive, something like…an alien threat. Secluded and under pressure, the authors deliver their product but they hear nothing back from Stalin and are told, on pain of death, to forget everything. Fast forward to 1986. There are only two of the original group of science fiction writers now living, one working for the KGB, the other as an English translator, both of advanced age. It happens that they run into each other after all these years. It seems that the threat they created those many years before is coming true…or is it? This is a smart, fun book. It’s hilarious in some places, brilliantly funny in others (like the conversation that ensues from inside one of the Chernobyl reactors). Skvorecky’s humor is dry and ironic, and it serves to keep the story from going completely madcap. Not a lot of women in Roberts’ book—one obese, but lovely Scientologist—, and towards the end I was tiring a bit (so much of men "mansplaining"* to each other), but still it was great ride and a nice distraction. Note: the title of the book is explained near the end of the story. Explanation probably not needed if you speak Russian. I recommend hubby’s (dukedom_enough) review here on the book’s page for another positive view’. *couldn’t find a better word :-) I was intrigued by the premise of this novel. In the 1930's, Stalin, fearing that the Soviet people would lose their unity once their common enemy, the West, was overcome, sought to create a new common enemy for the people to unite against. He brought together a group of respected science-fiction writers and asked them to create a credible scenario for an alien invasion. The writers do as they are asked, but are abruptly disbanded and told to forget everything they have just done. Several of the writers disappear. Flash forward to the 1980's. One of the writers is working as a lowly translator when a series of events occur which mirror the events the group wrote about in the 1930's. Things start to move quickly, and the writer is hounded by the Moscow police, the KGB, a taxi driver with Aspbergers, a couple of Scientology adherents, and (perhaps???) aliens. I would describe this book as madcap and surreal. It didn't always make sense and I didn't really connect with it, but if this sort of thing intrigues you, try it, you might like it. By the way, one of the funniest parts of the book comes when we learn the significance of its title. You might be able to guess what that is if you speak Russian. I don't, and I was wondering most of the way through if the title had any meaning.
... in part a droll comedy of manners parodying the fall of Soviet communism, part an intellectual inquiry into the idea of multiple quantum realities and part an attempt to discover why, despite the ubiquity of reported sightings, UFOs have never been proved to exist. As ever with Roberts, the writing is impeccable and the ideas riveting. AwardsDistinctions
Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth ... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it--the population of the whole world!' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it. But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true ... A typically mind-blowing SF novel from one of the genre's literary stars. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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