Sheltering in Place: Metro 2033
“… two grey humped figures emerged from behind the corner of the building he and Daniel were in. They made their way slowly across the courtyard, as if they were searching for something. Suddenly, one of the creatures stopped and raised its head, and Artyom felt as if it was looking directly at the window at which he was standing. […]
“Librarians?” he whispered with alarm, also squatting so as not to be visible from the street.
– Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 (Glukhovsky 2010)
What more appropriate antagonists could there be for a transmedia project that includes novels, interactive web sites, and video games than mutated, bloodthirsty librarians? Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro 2033 shares Tolstaya’s vague postnuclear scenario, her preoccupation with human degeneration, and her transposition of old or current cultural trends into an imaginary future. Its connection to books and literacy, however, is more ambiguous. Metro 2033 in all its myriad formats is a thoroughly digital phenomenon, ranging from first-person narrator to first-person shooter. Initiated on the author’s blog before its expansion and publication as a book, Metro 2033 has migrated from platform to platform: audiobooks, eBooks, paper books, comics, and, most famously, video games (now on PC, Xbox, and Steam). It has spawned sequels (Metro 2034 and Metro 2035, of course), made its way through film development hell, and served as the basis for an expanded set of fictional publications: the multiauthored novels and short stories published as “The Universe of Metro 2033” (59 volumes and counting).
Though the franchise began in prose, its continual transmedia metamorphoses undermine both traditional logocentrism and Romantic notions of the autonomous author. The online versions of the books appear long before their print publication, giving the chance for readers to comment, make suggestions, and contribute to the franchise’s world-building project (through art and music). By contrast, Tolstaya’s novel has won a great deal of acclaim, but one would be hard pressed to find Slynx fan-fiction.
Set only twenty years after a nuclear holocaust (as opposed to The Slynx’s 200), Metro 2033 offers more possibilities for the survivors to encounter the remains of the past. The premise is appealingly simple: the survivors of the war have taken refuge in Moscow’s vast metro system, devolving into clans centered around the various stations. Under constant threat by mutated rats and the mysterious Dark Ones (“Chernye”), about whom little is known, they live in a state of continuous military readiness. The novel’s hero, Artyom, was rescued from a rat attack as a small child and raised by a man at the VDNKh station. Now an adult, Artyom meets a mysterious man named Hunter (“Khanter”), who sends him on a quest to stop the Dark Ones. After a series of adventures and misadventures, Artyom finds his way to Ostankino Tower, from where he can fire missiles at the Botanical Gardens and destroy the Dark Ones forever. In a twist straight out of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), Artyom learns that the Dark Ones meant no harm, but his discovery comes too late.”
On the whole, Metro 2033 is much less book-haunted than The Slynx – among the many aspects of the novel that could be considered a critique of contemporary Russia is the portrayal of the surviving humans as a largely postliterate society. When the possibility of a powerful, virtually magic book is raised two-thirds of the way through the novel, one could easily dismiss it as just another talisman to be collected in a tale whose structure owed much to video games long before it was adapted into one. The hunt for a particular book (or “Book”) owes as much to the novel’s concern for Moscow architecture as to anything else: the Book can only be found in the Russian State Library. Whether the Library itself has become a source of magic, or whether its mystique is a function of the survivors’ ignorance remains unclear. Most of the information about the Library is provided by Artyom’s traveling companion, Daniel, who approaches his topic with all the reverence of a cargo cultist: “The card catalogue,” said Daniel quietly, looking around with reverence. “The future can be foretold using these drawers. The initiated know how. After a ritual, you blindly pick one of the cabinets, then randomly pull on a drawer and take any card. If the ritual is properly performed, then the name of the book will foretell your future, provide a warning, or predict success.
But Daniel’s attitude towards the Library proves justified, at least as far as the feral Librarians are concerned. They clearly have paranormal abilities, and when they gut Daniel with their bare claws, they somehow read his mind and ventriloquize his words. Typically, Glukhovsky seems to want to have it both ways: to affirm the magic while also indulging in bathos. As Daniel dies, he gives Artyom a “bloodstained pasteboard rectangle … the card Daniel had taken out of the card catalogue drawer in the vestibule. The card read: ‘Shnurkov, N.E., Irrigation and the prospects for agriculture in the Tadzhik SSR. Dushanbe, 1965.” They come to the Library in search of a book that tells the future, but only find a bibliographic reference to a maximally irrelevant relic of the past.8”
Like Tolstaya, Glukhovsky uses his end-times scenario for satirical purposes, transforming the Moscow metro system into a microcosm of Russian historical, political, and intellectual trends. Here, too, the search for verisimilitude pays few dividends; the bands of survivors at the various stations display an unlikely sense of history and irony. The ring line (the metro’s outer belt, which connects with all the other lines) is managed by a coalition of trading partners who call themselves the “Hanseatic League.” The red line is controlled by unreconstructed communists (naturally); the remaining scientists and intellectuals are called “Brahmins”; a religious retreat run by fanatics is called the Watchtower; and the majority of metro society is in conflict with fascists who actually call themselves the Fourth Reich. The agenda behind Metro 2033’s taxonomy is not a realist one, nor is it, strictly speaking, science fictional; realism would put a premium on the postcatastrophic order’s psychological and political plausibility, while science fiction would apply similar principles in the name of “world-building.” This is not to say that Metro 2033 does not “work,” but it works according to the principles of its author’s satirical worldview and agenda, as well as the canons of computer games.
As with The Slynx, Glukhovsky’s debt to Chernobyl is obvious, but there is a crucial difference. Metro 2033 situated itself within a particular Russian science fiction tradition, first borrowing from it, but then pushing it forward. The world of Metro 2033 includes the now-ubiquitous “stalkers,” men who venture out of the subway system for valuable goods and intelligence. The inspiration is, of course, the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (Piknik na obochine, 1971) and its adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (1979). Though “stalker” is originally an English word, its use in Russian is quite specific (lacking, for example, the connection with sexual predation). When adopted by Glukhovsky for what turned out to be the first international transmedia hit to come out of the former Soviet Union, the stalker becomes a fixture of post-Soviet science fictional adventure, as ubiquitous as the robot was to Golden Age American science fiction. The example of Metro 2033 inspired another transmedia project that has grown even bigger than Glukhovsky, a work of stalker-like salvage and bricolage that combines all the primary tropes of post-Soviet, postapocalyptic entertainment: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a set of Ukrainian made, Russian language first-person shooters that have also become a successful series of novels and comics. Returning to the primal scene of Soviet catastrophe, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. unapologetically “borrows” the basic scenario outlined by the Strugatsky brothers and Tarkovsky, but with a crucial difference: now the “zone of exclusion” into which the stalkers venture is not the byproduct of an alien incursion, but the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. The postapocalyptic future looks more and more like a nightmare reconstituted out of the Soviet past.