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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
This review was originally posted on SFF Insiders
As has been the case with many of my more curious interests in the literary world, I was brought to the text of Metro 2033 via my appreciation for its adaptation, the 2010 videogame of the same name from Ukrainian developers 4A Games. It was the first time, by my recollection, that I’d ever played a videogame adapted from a novel; and so I was immediately fascinated by it for that reason alone. Movies, television, stage plays? Those all made sense to me. But making a videogame from a book? Must’ve been a heck of a book.
But there was a second facet to my curiosity with Metro 2033: the story of its rise to fame. The novel was originally published online in the halcyon days of 2002, back when we weren’t all subject to the tyrannical whims of “the Algorithm” and things on the internet were actually discoverable simply through aimless wanderings across the web. The behind-the-scenes tale of Metro’s successes is the kind of thing whispered of in awe between indie authors.
Did you know Glukhovsky just published the whole thing for free online before it got picked up by publishers?
Did you hear it had 2 million online readers before it ever went to print?
Even though I hadn’t written any of my own fiction when I first learned of the viral success of Metro 2033, I had dreams of a future in storytelling, and so back then and even now I can’t help but be a little jealous when I hear stories like this, or like those of Andy Weir’s The Martian, who similarly - after putting the whole book up for free on his website - had to deal with real human beings clamoring for him to actually sell the dang thing at which point he put a Kindle edition on Amazon and saw it rocket to best-seller status (I would give my left arm for Ridley Scott to adapt one of my books into a movie).
So what of Metro 2033?
Well, while I loved the game (and loved each of its sequels) I actually bounced off my initial attempt to read this book (in June of 2016 according to my Amazon purchases). I can’t especially recall why, though I can guess. Metro 2033 [the game] is a first-person-shooter - tense, bombastic, and horrific - but Metro 2033 [the book] is a whole different beast. It’s got tension, bombast, and horror, yes; but it is far closer in structure and texture to Homer’s Odyssey or Ovid’s Metamorphoses than its more linear and action-packed adaptation. And knowing what kind of media I was enjoying in the summer of 2016 (the delicious carnage of id Software’s 2016 DOOM reboot kept my heart rate elevated for months after I played it, and listening to even a second of Mick Gordon’s high-octane soundtrack can send me back there in an instant), I can imagine that the thoughtful, meandering, classically-literary texture of Metro 2033 was not what I was looking for when I first attempted to read it.
And so the orange Post-it note I left some quarter of the way through the book lingered there between its pages for years, through multiple moves across three states, until the moment I pulled it once again off my shelf at the beginning of May 2024.
And this time it clicked.
For those who might’ve skimmed the above blurb or are unfamiliar with the Metro games, the story of Metro 2033 takes place almost entirely in the underground tunnels of Moscow’s Metro system following a devastating nuclear war on the surface. Our protagonist Artyom lives in the VDNKh station, near the outermost ring of the Metro system, and - key to the events of the story - near a nest of surface-dwelling creatures known as “the dark ones” who threaten to overwhelm VDNKh, and subsequently the whole Metro.
As post-apocalyptic tales go, Metro 2033 is an interesting case. The apocalypse of Metro is recent, with many of the Metro’s inhabitants still holding fresh memories of life on the surface. Even Artyom was born prior to the war, though was little more than a toddler when the first bombs fell and the people of Moscow fled into the earth. And as the world ground to a halt in the years that followed, so too does the story of Metro 2033 begin in almost complete stillness.
Artyom and several companions are on patrol at the four hundred-fiftieth meter of the tunnel beyond VDNKh, and after scaring off some small creature back into the stygian pit of the unending tunnel, the men of the patrol sit down by the fire and talk.
I mentioned earlier that Metro 2033 bears the texture of Homer and Ovid in that, similarly to those stories, Metro 2033’s structure is - for most of the narrative - episodic. It could easily be an anthology. An incredible amount of this book is told in monologues around the fire, as Artyom listens - sometimes for multiple pages - to the tales of his myriad companions. Sometimes they tell stories of life on the surface, sometimes they gossip about other stations, sometimes they philosophize about the nature of life in the Metro, and sometimes they prophecy about the future.
Metro 2033 thus impressed upon me, maybe intentionally, maybe not, that it was not meant to be read all at once. Like the travels of Artyom through the many stations of Moscow’s Metro, it would be valuable to take time between the stories, to pause, rest, and reflect. And so, I made a conscious effort on this read-through to take that time for rest and reflection, and only read one chapter of Metro 2033 a day. And I have to say, given the narrative density of each of Metro 2033’s chapters, I ended up incredibly happy with this pace.
Certain chapters, especially towards the end, do flow together in distinct continuity; but in the earliest moments of the book each chapter feels like a whole story unto itself - and rarely is that story entirely Artyom’s. We can almost picture Artyom as the unintentional chronicler of the tales of the Metro, an unwitting historian of his people. He is a Dante of sorts, describing his travels not through the circles of Hell, but through the winding passages of the Metro. Through his point-of-view we get a front row seat to the rich and diverse world beneath the world.
And in one such interaction, one of Artyom’s brief companions remarks,
“Lord, what a splendid world we ruined…”
The world of Metro 2033 is incredibly ruined, and incredibly weird. And it’s in these weirder, otherworldly moments that we see just how much Metro 2033 owes to the other titan of Russian apocalyptic fiction, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In between the gentle, quiet moments of Artyom’s campfire stories are cerebral, fantastic, altogether mesmerizing moments of unsettling, eldritch horror. The quieter moments can almost lull you into forgetting that this is a world devolved by war, morphed by nuclear weapons into a waking nightmare - into a world, in some cases, beyond comprehension.
I will not spoil the ending of this book, but suffice to say Glukhovsky has a lot to say about violence and war, (particularly about how such things - despite what war apologists will tell you - never really serve to accomplish anything except to create more tragedy), and not only that, but Glukhovsky has much to say about the people who order such action.
In Glukhovsky’s text, nationalism is as dangerous to the people of the Metro as are the irradiated, mutated monsters that stalk its blackened tunnels. In one chapter, in which Artyom is taken in by a loosely Christian monastic society, the monks’ Elder dispenses this nugget:
“Satan deceives people by inciting nationalistic pride within them and inducing them to worship political organizations… People think that their race or nation is superior to others. But it isn’t true.”
It’s clear - not even in subtext, just in the text itself - that Glukhovsky has a deep disdain for all forms of authoritarianism and all types of autocrats. The dwellers of the Metro’s “Red Line”, those who continue to fetishize the long dead Soviet Union, are narratively spit upon in the same manner as the fascist Nazis of the Metro’s “Fourth Reich”. And in a bit of symbolism that runs right up against being too on-the-nose, in the burnt-out husk of Moscow there lives beneath the Kremlin a monstrous beast that can hypnotize its prey into willfully hurling themselves into its gullet.
These beliefs are not merely contained to Glukhovsky’s fiction. He is currently living in exile from his native Russia due to his outspoken criticism of Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, criticism that earned him the prestigious honor of being “wanted” by the Russian government “under an unspecified article of the criminal code” (Reuters - June 7, 2022).
Toward the end of Metro 2033 Arytom inner-monologue-edly remarks that his adventure has been a - as we’ve long understood - kind of odyssey, a voyage across the sprawl of Moscow’s underworld and across the otherworldly tendrils that connect its people. There is a distinct juxtaposition between the claustrophobic nature of the dimly lit tunnels and the opening of Artyom’s mind as he explores it. Mirroring the nature and original function of the Metro itself, the story of Metro 2033 is about connections, both the expected and the unexpected; and it’s about the responsibility we all bear when we make those connections with one another.
If you’re looking for thoughtful, meandering, and thrilling exploration of a world after the end of everything, check out Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033.
As has been the case with many of my more curious interests in the literary world, I was brought to the text of Metro 2033 via my appreciation for its adaptation, the 2010 videogame of the same name from Ukrainian developers 4A Games. It was the first time, by my recollection, that I’d ever played a videogame adapted from a novel; and so I was immediately fascinated by it for that reason alone. Movies, television, stage plays? Those all made sense to me. But making a videogame from a book? Must’ve been a heck of a book.
But there was a second facet to my curiosity with Metro 2033: the story of its rise to fame. The novel was originally published online in the halcyon days of 2002, back when we weren’t all subject to the tyrannical whims of “the Algorithm” and things on the internet were actually discoverable simply through aimless wanderings across the web. The behind-the-scenes tale of Metro’s successes is the kind of thing whispered of in awe between indie authors.
Did you know Glukhovsky just published the whole thing for free online before it got picked up by publishers?
Did you hear it had 2 million online readers before it ever went to print?
Even though I hadn’t written any of my own fiction when I first learned of the viral success of Metro 2033, I had dreams of a future in storytelling, and so back then and even now I can’t help but be a little jealous when I hear stories like this, or like those of Andy Weir’s The Martian, who similarly - after putting the whole book up for free on his website - had to deal with real human beings clamoring for him to actually sell the dang thing at which point he put a Kindle edition on Amazon and saw it rocket to best-seller status (I would give my left arm for Ridley Scott to adapt one of my books into a movie).
So what of Metro 2033?
Well, while I loved the game (and loved each of its sequels) I actually bounced off my initial attempt to read this book (in June of 2016 according to my Amazon purchases). I can’t especially recall why, though I can guess. Metro 2033 [the game] is a first-person-shooter - tense, bombastic, and horrific - but Metro 2033 [the book] is a whole different beast. It’s got tension, bombast, and horror, yes; but it is far closer in structure and texture to Homer’s Odyssey or Ovid’s Metamorphoses than its more linear and action-packed adaptation. And knowing what kind of media I was enjoying in the summer of 2016 (the delicious carnage of id Software’s 2016 DOOM reboot kept my heart rate elevated for months after I played it, and listening to even a second of Mick Gordon’s high-octane soundtrack can send me back there in an instant), I can imagine that the thoughtful, meandering, classically-literary texture of Metro 2033 was not what I was looking for when I first attempted to read it.
And so the orange Post-it note I left some quarter of the way through the book lingered there between its pages for years, through multiple moves across three states, until the moment I pulled it once again off my shelf at the beginning of May 2024.
And this time it clicked.
For those who might’ve skimmed the above blurb or are unfamiliar with the Metro games, the story of Metro 2033 takes place almost entirely in the underground tunnels of Moscow’s Metro system following a devastating nuclear war on the surface. Our protagonist Artyom lives in the VDNKh station, near the outermost ring of the Metro system, and - key to the events of the story - near a nest of surface-dwelling creatures known as “the dark ones” who threaten to overwhelm VDNKh, and subsequently the whole Metro.
As post-apocalyptic tales go, Metro 2033 is an interesting case. The apocalypse of Metro is recent, with many of the Metro’s inhabitants still holding fresh memories of life on the surface. Even Artyom was born prior to the war, though was little more than a toddler when the first bombs fell and the people of Moscow fled into the earth. And as the world ground to a halt in the years that followed, so too does the story of Metro 2033 begin in almost complete stillness.
Artyom and several companions are on patrol at the four hundred-fiftieth meter of the tunnel beyond VDNKh, and after scaring off some small creature back into the stygian pit of the unending tunnel, the men of the patrol sit down by the fire and talk.
I mentioned earlier that Metro 2033 bears the texture of Homer and Ovid in that, similarly to those stories, Metro 2033’s structure is - for most of the narrative - episodic. It could easily be an anthology. An incredible amount of this book is told in monologues around the fire, as Artyom listens - sometimes for multiple pages - to the tales of his myriad companions. Sometimes they tell stories of life on the surface, sometimes they gossip about other stations, sometimes they philosophize about the nature of life in the Metro, and sometimes they prophecy about the future.
Metro 2033 thus impressed upon me, maybe intentionally, maybe not, that it was not meant to be read all at once. Like the travels of Artyom through the many stations of Moscow’s Metro, it would be valuable to take time between the stories, to pause, rest, and reflect. And so, I made a conscious effort on this read-through to take that time for rest and reflection, and only read one chapter of Metro 2033 a day. And I have to say, given the narrative density of each of Metro 2033’s chapters, I ended up incredibly happy with this pace.
Certain chapters, especially towards the end, do flow together in distinct continuity; but in the earliest moments of the book each chapter feels like a whole story unto itself - and rarely is that story entirely Artyom’s. We can almost picture Artyom as the unintentional chronicler of the tales of the Metro, an unwitting historian of his people. He is a Dante of sorts, describing his travels not through the circles of Hell, but through the winding passages of the Metro. Through his point-of-view we get a front row seat to the rich and diverse world beneath the world.
And in one such interaction, one of Artyom’s brief companions remarks,
“Lord, what a splendid world we ruined…”
The world of Metro 2033 is incredibly ruined, and incredibly weird. And it’s in these weirder, otherworldly moments that we see just how much Metro 2033 owes to the other titan of Russian apocalyptic fiction, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. In between the gentle, quiet moments of Artyom’s campfire stories are cerebral, fantastic, altogether mesmerizing moments of unsettling, eldritch horror. The quieter moments can almost lull you into forgetting that this is a world devolved by war, morphed by nuclear weapons into a waking nightmare - into a world, in some cases, beyond comprehension.
I will not spoil the ending of this book, but suffice to say Glukhovsky has a lot to say about violence and war, (particularly about how such things - despite what war apologists will tell you - never really serve to accomplish anything except to create more tragedy), and not only that, but Glukhovsky has much to say about the people who order such action.
In Glukhovsky’s text, nationalism is as dangerous to the people of the Metro as are the irradiated, mutated monsters that stalk its blackened tunnels. In one chapter, in which Artyom is taken in by a loosely Christian monastic society, the monks’ Elder dispenses this nugget:
“Satan deceives people by inciting nationalistic pride within them and inducing them to worship political organizations… People think that their race or nation is superior to others. But it isn’t true.”
It’s clear - not even in subtext, just in the text itself - that Glukhovsky has a deep disdain for all forms of authoritarianism and all types of autocrats. The dwellers of the Metro’s “Red Line”, those who continue to fetishize the long dead Soviet Union, are narratively spit upon in the same manner as the fascist Nazis of the Metro’s “Fourth Reich”. And in a bit of symbolism that runs right up against being too on-the-nose, in the burnt-out husk of Moscow there lives beneath the Kremlin a monstrous beast that can hypnotize its prey into willfully hurling themselves into its gullet.
These beliefs are not merely contained to Glukhovsky’s fiction. He is currently living in exile from his native Russia due to his outspoken criticism of Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, criticism that earned him the prestigious honor of being “wanted” by the Russian government “under an unspecified article of the criminal code” (Reuters - June 7, 2022).
Toward the end of Metro 2033 Arytom inner-monologue-edly remarks that his adventure has been a - as we’ve long understood - kind of odyssey, a voyage across the sprawl of Moscow’s underworld and across the otherworldly tendrils that connect its people. There is a distinct juxtaposition between the claustrophobic nature of the dimly lit tunnels and the opening of Artyom’s mind as he explores it. Mirroring the nature and original function of the Metro itself, the story of Metro 2033 is about connections, both the expected and the unexpected; and it’s about the responsibility we all bear when we make those connections with one another.
If you’re looking for thoughtful, meandering, and thrilling exploration of a world after the end of everything, check out Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033.
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
👍👍👍
Was expecting jump scare horror. Instead I've been kept awake at night from psychological horrors and philosophy questions.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
It's a great book. I finished the game trilogy first, which I really like, and I have to say that the book definitely surpasses the first volume. Glukhovsky does a great job with the subway mythology and plays with the darkness wonderfully, some passages are downright breathtaking. Artyom is a very likeable character, and very easy to identify with. The book is very easy to read and the 500 pages fly by. Definitely one of the absolute best sci-fi books I've read.
Good, grungy, murky, post-nuclear dystopia. The conceit of the book is really well executed, full of mutants and paramilitary factions.
Not sure about the ending though...
Not sure about the ending though...
Tak můj velký sci-fi rest konečně "pokořen" co se týče prvního dílu. Na jednu stranu naprosto chápu, proč můj manžel v tom našel naprostou fascinaci, na druhou stranu já osobně jsem se se čtením maličko trápila. Neříkám, že mně to vyloženě nebavilo, ale na můj vkus je v té knize až příliš mnoho jmen, názvů a pojmů - a to jsem přečetla Marťana a Spasitele od Weira, které obsahují ještě technické parametry vesmírných lodí atd. Ale co se Glukhovkymu musí nechat, je že umí fakt dobře vyprávět. Nedávno jsem četla jeho novinku - Stanoviště, od které zatím mám jen první díl, ale určitě nezůstanu jenom u něj, a pořídím si další díly. Přišlo mi, že Stanoviště bylo takové ucelenější, srozumitelnější bych řekla? I když se více opíralo o fanatismus ... ale stejně jako série Metro se odehrává "v podzemí" :-) Co se týče Metra, trošku mi tu vadili někdy až hrozně dlouhé kapitoly, hlavně takové ty vycpávkové popisy, určitě by se to dalo trošičku "seškrtat".
Ale Metro 2033 je hrozně specifické, až vlastně dobře propracované. Jen složité. Člověk si musí na tu přemíru pojmů a jmen zvyknout, aby se dokázal dobře zorientovat v příběhu. Ale jo, vlastně mně to bavilo, i když jsem v tom byla strašně pomalá :D Navíc jsem prokládala audioknihu ebookem, protože na manželovy knihy se neodvažuji sahat :D
Určitě budu v sérii pokračovat, proto mně to zajímá, jak to bude dál s Arťomem, hlavně mně zajímá, co se stane se stanicí VDNCH, se strýčkem a dalšími obyvateli této stanice - zda se je podaří zachránit!
Ale Metro 2033 je hrozně specifické, až vlastně dobře propracované. Jen složité. Člověk si musí na tu přemíru pojmů a jmen zvyknout, aby se dokázal dobře zorientovat v příběhu. Ale jo, vlastně mně to bavilo, i když jsem v tom byla strašně pomalá :D Navíc jsem prokládala audioknihu ebookem, protože na manželovy knihy se neodvažuji sahat :D
Určitě budu v sérii pokračovat, proto mně to zajímá, jak to bude dál s Arťomem, hlavně mně zajímá, co se stane se stanicí VDNCH, se strýčkem a dalšími obyvateli této stanice - zda se je podaří zachránit!