Reviewed by Djibril
Originally published in Russia in 1992, this short, post-Communist novel manages to satirise the Soviet political machine while wisely avoiding any idealisation of the west. The narrator—a young cosmonaut named Omon—as a boy dreams of flying as freedom from earthly weights, 'which, incidentally, is why all my life I've only been bored by all those Western radio voices, and those books by various Solzhenitsyns' (8).
Omon (who dubs himself 'Ra' after the Egyptian sun-god he read about in the Atheist's Handbook) and his childhood friend Mitiok dream all their lives of flying to the moon, and finally grow up to join the army and enrol in a special KGB cosmonaut training programme, where they are instructed to secretly operate an ostensibly 'automatic' moonwalker mission—a one-way trip, naturally. With ruthless cynicism, Pelevin puts his characters through betrayal after deceit after abuse, but never fails to show us the humanity not only of the victims but of the officials and commanders who so brutally manipulate them. It is a credit to the good humour and fluid characterisation that what could have been a grim, nihilistic read remains both entertaining and engaging throughout the quite horrifying developments of the later story. And it is a sign of the strong plot that even after so much illusion and reality-questioning that would leave even the hardest-headed and least post-modern of readers an agnostic doubting the doomed narrator's reliability, the twist toward the end manages both to surprise and to trump the cynicism and deception of the rest of the book.
For a story about space travel, this novel contains remarkably few of the trappings of speculative fiction: the science is neither futuristic nor speculative; the history is mildly revisionist rather than alternative; the 'oriental religion' influences touted on the back cover seem limited to Omon's reading about the falcon-headed Egyptian god, and perhaps the fatalistic philosophy of the characters. If this is an example of mainstream (or is it slipstream?) literature colouring itself with borrowed genre elements, it is a successful (if only lightly tinted) example of the phenomenon.
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