Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Started: July 22, 2012
Finished: July 29, 2012
Pages: 326

The pull quote on the front cover says "Should have won the 2009 Booker Prize". While Kim Stanley Robinson is perhaps not the best judge of that, this is definitely a smart, well-written book.

The narrator,Konstantin Svorecky,is a veteran of the Great Patriotic War who's eking out a living as an English-Russian translator in the dying days of the USSR. There are only two remarkable things about Svorecky: he no longer drinks vodka.  And he used to write science fiction.

His incentive to stop drinking vodka is a terrifying accident involving vodka, his beard, and a drunken miscalculation with a lighter.  His incentive to stop writing science fiction is no less terrifying:  a personal encounter with Joseph Stalin. In the wake of the Second World War he and 5 other science fiction writers are summoned by Stalin and ordered to invent an alien invasion that could be used to unify the Soviet peoples.  ("I give the Americans five years" scoffs Stalin).  

Against all expectations, all six writers escape with their lives when the top secret project is abruptly cancelled.  Svorecky abandons writing, abandons his dreams of the future, and spends the next 40 years religiously following his orders to forget the very existence of the project.  Until 1986.....when the Challenger disaster, a chance encounter with the lone other surviving writer from the project, a meeting   with two American Scientologists, and an unexpected visit to the Pushkin chess club lead him to the fantastic supposition that the story that they invented 40 years before might just be starting to come true.

Not that Svorecky believes this for a second.  He is an ironist, as his KGB interrogator so furiously expostulates, and his ironic outlook on life infuses this first person account with a very Russian world-weariness.  "I drank more than most Russians.  That, I am perfectly well aware, is quite a boast." "Writers you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any others in this respect.  A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his finance; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying."

I found this book in the science fiction section, but it could be enjoyed by any reader of historical fiction who has the patience to follow the meanderings of an elderly and skeptical former writer of science fiction.