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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A fantastic concept executed really well. The russians know how to do sci fi well.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A Boring Genius!
It took me almost a year to finish this book! That’s how boring and slow it was. The series of events that the protagonist experiences has been written in a way that eradicates any doubt that they were there to fill in the pages. His journey starts from VDKN station and ends (almost) there with lots of things changed, himself included. During his journey he encounters many irrelevant characters that are put there by the author to either help him move forward and reach his goals or are simply there to be a testament to “human evilness” or to elicit the pity in the reader and this makes them unnecessary and forced and renders the whole story contrived. To be more specific, the encounter with the “Great Worm Worshipers” is by far the worst! The story suddenly derails into a boring/philosophical pages of monologue of that manipulating priest about the creation of the universe. And I think this long long section was only there to feed us the author’s thoughts and beliefs and I honestly couldn’t care less. Just move on with the story! We all can understand the metaphors.
The positive points of this book are the genius in designing the closed ecological system of the metro and the trade mechanism and the protectionism. The fact that various factions have set up defence systems how they are cultivating mushrooms and feeding on pigs and how the class difference also exists in the post apocalyptic world.
Unfortunately, non of the characters, protagonist included, are relatable. They feel distant and shallow like the objective he seeks. Worth mentioning that the plot twist at the end was really good!
Anyways, I will listen to the audiobook for the second volume since I think it will be a boring stretch like this one!
It took me almost a year to finish this book! That’s how boring and slow it was. The series of events that the protagonist experiences has been written in a way that eradicates any doubt that they were there to fill in the pages. His journey starts from VDKN station and ends (almost) there with lots of things changed, himself included. During his journey he encounters many irrelevant characters that are put there by the author to either help him move forward and reach his goals or are simply there to be a testament to “human evilness” or to elicit the pity in the reader and this makes them unnecessary and forced and renders the whole story contrived. To be more specific, the encounter with the “Great Worm Worshipers” is by far the worst! The story suddenly derails into a boring/philosophical pages of monologue of that manipulating priest about the creation of the universe. And I think this long long section was only there to feed us the author’s thoughts and beliefs and I honestly couldn’t care less. Just move on with the story! We all can understand the metaphors.
The positive points of this book are the genius in designing the closed ecological system of the metro and the trade mechanism and the protectionism. The fact that various factions have set up defence systems how they are cultivating mushrooms and feeding on pigs and how the class difference also exists in the post apocalyptic world.
Unfortunately, non of the characters, protagonist included, are relatable. They feel distant and shallow like the objective he seeks. Worth mentioning that the plot twist at the end was really good!
Anyways, I will listen to the audiobook for the second volume since I think it will be a boring stretch like this one!
I played the second game in the Metro franchise (which, based on the ending of the book, picks up nicely where this story left off) so I came into this at least mildly familiar with the universe and Artyom. However, the game felt like it had way more direction. Artyom has no agency, instead seeming to wander from one ridiculous and dangerous situation to another - often being rescued or escaping through no direct action of his own. He is passive in his own story! Maybe after this great adventure, he'll have more agency and the second book (which I have queued) will provide more in terms of a concrete plot and character arc.
That being said, there were some really awesome moments during the story when Artyom is alone (because almost every single person he interacts with on his journey dies) that Glukhovsky shows us the real psychological trauma caused by the darkness and the alienness of the metro. We see the dregs of humanity, scraping life from mushrooms and filth, creating their own elaborate religions to explain away the horror that is their lives. But because there are so many such groups of people, it makes the story feel very disjointed - almost like a violent, Russian Alice in Wonderland.
That being said, there were some really awesome moments during the story when Artyom is alone (because almost every single person he interacts with on his journey dies) that Glukhovsky shows us the real psychological trauma caused by the darkness and the alienness of the metro. We see the dregs of humanity, scraping life from mushrooms and filth, creating their own elaborate religions to explain away the horror that is their lives. But because there are so many such groups of people, it makes the story feel very disjointed - almost like a violent, Russian Alice in Wonderland.
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I had to listen to the audiobook version it was so hard to pronounce any of the names. But it was still a great book. I just watched my husband play this game, and I keep comparing the two. It was riveting and suspenseful. I was at the edge of my seat if Artyom was ever going to make it to Polis. Will he be able to pass the message to Miller? Will he ever see his uncle again? Will Hunter find Artyom? The people you meet through Artyom's adventure through the metro were intriguing, to say the least. It's like Fallout but in a Metro station minus the vaults. There are certain parts of the Metro that have been blocked off, certain parts where there are check points, and other parts are inhabited by very interesting folks. Like psycho nutty people. Which I'm going to say they inhaled too much gas, okay! This book is full of survival instincts, and there were multiple times where I found myself. Is this him dreaming, or is he tripping because of the gas, or is this legit happening right now. This book deserves another re read in the future.
adventurous
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
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
👍👍👍