Name: Yellow Blue Tibia
Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780575083561

Adam Roberts

Yellow Blue Tibia

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.

Tim Pendry

This is not so much a science fiction book (the sci fi is crammed into the last thirty or so pages but I refuse to do a spoiler here) as a book about science fiction - the old Soviet science fiction tradition. This Soviet tradition followed a different trajectory from that of the West with Zamyatin, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as its masters. Its most well known writers outside the 'East; are probably Mikhail Bulgakov and the Strugatsky Brothers ('Roadside Picnic') to whom might be added the Polish writer Stanislas Lem ('Solaris'). There is plenty of good material on this on Wikipedia. The book does not entirely convince as an evocation of Soviet life. It comes across, despite some very fine characterisation, and well researched period detail, as a very Western interpretation of local reality. Occasionally, we see ideas that could only have come from the contemporary West slip in, to be articulated by mildly stereotyped Russians. There is one scene that is pure X-Files - I mean 'pure', a nice lift of a key theme: see if you can identify it. Nevertheless, the basic thesis is intriguing and well played. A group of science fiction writers are commissioned to write an alien invasion scenario by Stalin (mimicking a similar trope from cold war conspiracy theory surrounding Western UFOs). The story then jumps into the era of sclerosis and perestroika as the events postulated then become reality 'now'. To tell more would be to ruin the tale ... What we can say is that Roberts is writing a book about the social construction of reality and there are some insights around pages 275 to 290 (in this edition) that show a mood of the moment that we have seen elsewhere - to say more would ruin the story. The book is well written (very occasionally, we might do with more 'pace'), very entertaining and recommended. The end might boggle the mind a bit after what went before but that's what science fiction writers are supposed to do for us.

Yellow Blue Tibia

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