Dear Papa
by anne ylvisakerThe book takes place in the family home of 9 year old isabelle it is the year 1943 two year before W
Read ReviewMetro 2033
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The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend. More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man's time is over. A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity's last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price. VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line. It was one of the Metro's best stations and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared. Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the whole Metro - and maybe the whole of humanity.
Reviews
Aug 22,2012
Metro 2033: Dmitry Glukhovsky
This novel entails the story of a 20 year old Russian named Artyum. The year is 2033 and is the ten year anniversary of the nuclear war that covered the earth in radiation and snow. A few of the survivors managed to get into the Moscow metro that was built into a giant bomb shelter before the war began. Only forty thousand managed to get into the metro the others were either killed in the blast or irradiated to the point of server mutation or death. Ten years past and the metro had survived and formed into a miniature civilisation, each platform of the metro turned into towns and cities they would trade amongst each other to survive. Artyum had to grow up with the perils of the tunnels, his own parents died when he was twelve; they were eaten by a flood of rats that killed almost the whole population of the station, in his mother’s dying throws she managed to get her son to a soldier who escaped on a hand cart, this man later became his step farther Sukhoi.
Sukhoi is one of the representatives of VDNKh, an underground metro station which acts as a shelter for the survivors of the holocaust. Artyom grew up to become a guard of VDNKh, but his ambitions where to be a stalker, someone who goes up to the surface to gather supplies vital for survival of the stations. Sukhoi travelled a lot and adventured for weeks at a time, when he got back he would tell artyum stories that would both terrify and excite him about the other station and the outside world.
One day a friend of Sukhoi arrived at the station, his name was Hunter, he was a ranger of Polis one of the larger stations of the metro and the richest. He came to catch up with Sukhoi but also warn him about trouble coming towards VDNKh, they were called the dark ones, an ethereal evolution of the humans more suited to the conditions of the new world shaped by war. They were tall sentient beings; their skin was coloured deep black, with long three fingered arms and a blank black stare. With only a gash for a mouth and slots for eyes and noses they looked other worldly. They were rumoured to have taken out whole stations filled with people and soldiers without weapons, when the stations were discovered there were no bodies only blood. It was said that the dark ones used supernatural powers to control human emotion and manipulate their thoughts to make them scared of them to become paranoid about everything until they break you, then they strike and take you.
The rest of the story consists of atriums promise to hunter to get to polis and warn everyone about the dark ones rising to power. In his journey he faces many dangers mutants off all sorts, bandits, soviet communist loyalists, Nazi loyalist and wars between them. He makes a few friends along the way who help him with achieving his goal of defeating the dark one and saving humanity from extinction.
pictures taken from the Metro 2033 game (also recommended)
