Regarding Metro 2033 (the book and the game)

Having spent the majority of this summer in a state of idleness that’d rival a certain folivorous mammal, I figured it was high-time I shifted my ass into gear and started preparing for university. Of course, to a lazy person, the concept of “adequate preparation” more often than not involves performing a set of enjoyable activities vaguely related to the task at hand. In my case, preparing for an English Literature course involves reading popular science fiction novels and playing the follow up games.

Metro 2033, the book, originally came to my attention when I learned that the eponymous, console exclusive Xbox 360 game was based on a Russian language novel by author Dmitry Glukhovsky. The premise is this: Nuclear fire has purged the Earth of humans. A small number of survivors, somewhere in the slim tens of thousands, have made their home in the Moscow Metro (originally designed to withstand a nuclear blast during the awkward decades of the 20^th century) and are eking out a pathetic existence on mushrooms and a small number of farm animals. The Metro inhabits scurry about their daily lives under the relatively benevolent and peaceful watch of the Hanza government who patrol the largest portion of the metro, although different factions with dangerously incompatible philosophies, such as the Communists and Fascists, control clumps of stations around the outskirts of dark civilisation. A new, seemingly sentient and incredibly deadly enemy has begun launching intermittent attacks on the northernmost independent station of VDNKh, corrupting the defenders’ minds with fear and draining them of all thought and life, leaving behind the vacant and untouched bodies. A young resident of VDNKh, Artyom, who interprets the “Dark Ones’” attacks as jumbled and inscrutable hallucinations, must fight his way through the hostilities of the Metro in order to help save his fellow humans; the same humans who Artyom witnesses performing acts of needless cruelty to each other, and who seem to do nothing but hinder his progress and try to kill him.

The irony in this book is as thick as syrup, and although there’s no canonical explanation by the author of the themes presented, I understood the novel to be a cynical take on the barbarity of inescapable human nature and an exploration of the value of humanity. This isn’t a work of art that forces you to get caught up in the moral message of the author to compensate for the dullness of the writing however. The richness of the writer’s language transcends the language barrier, and when the reader isn’t subject to the mortally-dangerous escapades of naive Artyom, he’s usually being treated to a look at what humanity has become in the dank, underdark Metro. There’s a strong supernatural element to this novel too, manifested in the form of ghosts, physical aberrations of mutated horror (including one terrifying carnivorous biomass that lures victims towards it by subverting their free will through an acutely developed sense of thought control) and haunted sections of the Metro stained with death, who replay the final moments of long-passed humans.

(See also some of my favourite fan art from the official website: [|One|Two|Three|Four|])

This bildungsroman has some truly terrifying moments in it, but the dark and serious undertones of the novel are laced with typically Russian humour and light-hearted moments, the former of which probably flying over the heads of most non-Russian readers (such as myself) and the latter coming across with a sort of international clarity.

The few issues I do have are mostly pedantic ones, particularly with the proof-reading of the translation. There is an abundance of mistakes in the novel, and irritatingly most of them appear towards the end, when you really don’t want to break the immersion. Here is a small and truncated list of a few I recorded, which can also be found on my pithy Amazon review here:

- Errors in transliteration: (“Tsvetnoi Bulvap” instead of “Tsvetnoi Bulvar”. Note that the letter ‘P’ in Cyrillic makes an ‘R’ sound to an English-speaker.)

- Missing out letters: Pg 406 ("increaingly difficult to carry him")
- Missing out full stops: Pg 408 ("...had fled this place Further on there were...")
- Repetition of words or phrases: Pg 213 ("...but only picking up some kind of some kind of brownish...")

Despite these errors, many more of which I probably failed to notice, the fluidity of the novel remains largely unaffected, although there were one or two sections I found to be uninspiring; this is something I attribute to the untranslatability to some of the humour, however. This is well worth your time if you happen to be connoisseur of fine science fiction, although I’d equally recommend it to someone looking for something to intermittently entertain them for a few days. It impressed me enough that I immediately starting searching for a translated copy of the sequel (which doesn’t exist at the time of writing), and a day or two after purchased the game, my opinion of which I will now disclose.

Y’know how when you develop such a love and admiration for a particular piece of media that you develop unrealistic expectations for any related merchandise to ignite within you the same rapture you felt swirling around in your body from the original wonder? That’s basically the experience I had with Metro 2033 – an unfairly soured experience that would have otherwise been enjoyable if I had had my brain exposed to the idea that this was most likely an attempt to capitalise on the hardcore fanbase of the original novel. The game is by no means bad; it’s a fairly decent FPS with elements of survival horror and traces of role-playing in it, but I had been expecting a much more creative and (ironically) expansive, open-world approach to the Metro, rather than the linear and segmented game I was handed.

I think perhaps my problem with the game is that I’ve grown used to playing RPGs and am pretty much addicted to the minutiae of customisation and bagfuls of arbitrary quests that usually accompany any good RPG (such as the [Mass Effect / Baldur’s Gate / Fallout] series). The addition of new monsters that weren’t present in the book and the necessity of not only wearing a gas mask in certain situations, but ensuring that you have enough filters and taking care not to crack the glass, were welcome additions, but the inevitable omission of large chunks left me seething; in one particular instance, I arrived at the hub of activity, the economic and political heart of the Metro, a conglomeration of different cultures and philosophies and the size of four large stations, and was given NO opportunity to explore any of it before I was catapulted almost instantly into another mission that involved traipsing outside looking for the next arbitrary plot-driving MacGuffin.

I picked the game up for £15 off Amazon, and whilst I would tentatively recommend it to any prospective buyers or those shackled by the fetters of boredom who also happen to own an Xbox, I wouldn’t recommend paying much more for it than I did. I think £20 is a reasonable asking price, the campaign isn’t that long enough to justify the £30-£40 RRP, and there’s no multiplayer or unlockable features to pad out the rest of the game with. The game should provide you with a good few hours of entertainment, provided you don’t pre-emptively put it on a pedestal and idolise it based on the accomplishments of its relative.

Mass Effect and the universe

I haven’t written a post in a comparatively long while, and I guess I can attribute that to my recent purchase of an Xbox360 game called Mass Effect. I’ve been pretty much been spending all my time on it since then, exploring the virtual galaxy, sleeping with the good aliens and killing the bad ones. I spent about 15 hours over the course of two days working my way through the main storyline, and by the time I got the end I felt that familiar pang of emptiness in knowing that I’ve come the end of a great game.

So I did what I always do when I happen to find myself in that situation – I browse the internet for days on end, meticulously looking up every aspect of the selected mythos, scrutinising the events in the official canon and (in this case) reading up on all the different alien species.

And when I was done doing that, my insatiable appetite for knowledge eventually led my mind to the real world; and thus it humbly wondered about what lay beyond the skies above. Out there. Y’know, the “big black”.

I think that in the incomprehensibly large universe, with its quadrillions of stars and innumerable planets orbiting them is, on the whole, a vast and empty derelict playground. But those quadrillions of stars present quadrillions of opportunities, and all of a sudden thinking that there may be life elsewhere out there seems instead of silly to believe, silly to doubt.

Even sentient life doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch when you think about the endless stream of possibilities on all the planets in all the systems of all the galaxies. What really made me think is that, if there is sentient life out there, do they wonder about us? Do they theorise and postulate and debate in languages or other forms of communication? Do they have societies more technologically advanced than us; less? A better system, or a worse system of government? A freer form of society where people are much more accepted, or a unilateral government that punishes individuality?

Or do they have all of those things on a single planet, boasting variation to rival our own?

I get so caught up in this idea that there may be other sentient life out there and that they may think about us, that I completely forget the barriers that will prevent us from ever meeting them. Or even just knowing who, what and where they are.

I mean, on the off-chance that in that big, black emotionless void of space we call “the universe” some divine spark ignited the flame of life on another planet, we’d never ever know about it. It kinda makes me sad in a way, because it almost feels like a missed opportunity. Two hands aching to touch (they want to meet US, right?), but never quite close enough to reach.

It’s a lament comparable to when I think about the future because both have one thing in common: I won’t be there. Allow me to elaborate a little.

We think we live in a golden age. We live in a society that revolves around technology most of us don’t understand and consider ourselves VERY lucky we weren’t born, say, 150 years ago. I think we’re naive, because if you think about all the unprecedented things the folk in the 1950s couldn’t predict about time period (and if popular trends continue to stay popular), our society will be very different in 50 years time. 100 years time. 500 years time. Unprecedented. It will evolve and change (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse), empires will rise and fall, people be born, be great and inevitably die.

And eventually humanity will get to the stage where it’ll look back and see us as a “classical civilization”. We’ll be looked at (not necessarily negatively) as primitive and quaint. A broken society that set the foundations for the glorious, united utopia that will arise from the ashes of our soot and pollution fumes like a golden phoenix and dazzle the earth with its incredible ideas, thoughts, feelings, machines and technology. Taint the Earth with sparks of glory.

Don’t you see where I’m going with this? They’ll build a better society on our ruins. On our graves. And I can’t help but feel sad that I’m going to miss out on what the world 500 years from now will offer to those lucky enough to be born into it. Assuming war, famine, disease or general, ominimisanthropy doesn’t lead to our demise, we’ll become something great. We may like to think that we stand on the threshold of the apex of our prime and glory, but in reality our potential puts the house a trillion miles away on another planet.

A planet with life on it. I’ll keep both feet on the ground here and try and stay realistic: the chances of us coming across any form of life in the universe is highly unlikely. Sentient life? Astronomically unlikely (no pun intended). But I like thinking about these things, they really interest me.

And I guess if anyone happens to be reading this right now, you’re probably thinking I’m a crazy person based on my incoherent ramblings, and so I’ll conclude this spurt of randomness.

The universe is a lot like our minds: while most of it is wasted, some parts are truly incredible even as others are dark and scary. It’s endless, it’s infinite and it’s beyond our comprehension. Its mysterious facade only masks the underlying loneliness that echoes across it as it searches for someone else to share in its experiences.

I miss it.