1 files changed, 58 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/content/reviews/books/moscow-2042-1986.md b/content/reviews/books/moscow-2042-1986.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d701895
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/reviews/books/moscow-2042-1986.md
@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
++++
+title = "Moscow 2042 (Vladimir Voinovich, 1986)"
+author = ["Michał Sapka"]
+date = 2024-12-01T21:28:00+01:00
+categories = ["reviews"]
+draft = false
+weight = 2015
+reviewSection = ["Books"]
+abstract = "A short review of an absolute marvel of a book"
+image = "reviews/covers/moscow-2042.jpg"
+rating = 5
++++
+
+Up till recently, I have not heard of Vladimir Voinovich.
+As you may have noticed, my knowledge of Russian SF literature is quite shallow.
+Everyone has read at leat a few novels from Strugatsky brothers, and I am only now doing it.
+But as it turns out (thanks Mastodon!), Voinovich was a prolific writer.
+At least enough prolific and critical to be forced into exile from Russia!
+Somehow, it seems that only a few years Russian literature was considered to be up there, right among the final bosses of literature!
+But I'm too shallow for that.
+I will finish Solzhenitsyn's _Gulag Archipelago_ one day (the third book is wainting for me for some 15 years), but right now I NEED some fantastic elements in my critique of Communists regime.
+Luckily, Voinovich has me covered.
+
+_Moscow 2042_ is satirical novel where the author describes his fantastical time travel into the future, where he is sent to learn about and report on the Communism to come.
+You may have already guessed, that the painted picture is not pretty at all.
+
+It doesn't start like that.
+At first, Voinovich gets enticed with what he is presented with.
+It seem that the Communists of 2042 have learned from the past.
+They removed all the evil parts that _we_ have seem (and there were lots of them), but kept the spirit of communism: brothership, unity, and happiness.
+
+I will not spoil anything for the Curious Reader, but we spend the rest of the novel destroying that picture.
+Now, I am a bit too young to fully appreciate that (being born only 4 years before Poland regained it's independence from USSR), and I am sure to have missed a lot nuances, but I laughed and I cried.
+Author dissects all the horrors of communism then exaggerates them to absurd.
+It's kept light in tone, the atrocities seem distant and therefore funny.
+No chance in hell a system like that could ever be conceived.
+No one is cynical enough to establish it (but they did!)
+Fictionalized Voinoich is not a _member_ of this society.
+He is a VIP guest.
+He is able to get all the benefits it can give to the chosen few.
+And boy, if he doesn't!
+He takes all he can, not caring where it came from - as he starts to see behind the cracks.
+It's very hard to feel any sympathy for him.
+But then the bill comes... and I'll stop here.
+The story is masterfully crafted.
+
+I was, however, surprised by the SF elements.
+For most of the text, they are reduced to a MacGuffin, a non important tool to tell the story.
+If it stayed like this, _Moscow 2042_ (I keep writing it as 2024...) would be an excellent story.
+However, this changes significantly.
+Again, I won't go into spoiler territory (it came as a huge surprise!) but it is a time travel story with all of it's possibilities and paradoxes.
+Up till it is revealed, the time travel story make the book make very little sense (still great), but as a complete package it does.
+It may not go as hard into it like, let's say _All You Zombies_, but it goes hard enough to go into my personal "top time travel stories", together with the aforementioned short story, _Time Crimes_, _Looper_ and _Primer_.
+I have a type it seems.
+
+_Moscow 2024_ is one of the greatest SF books I've ever read.
+It's fantastical in it's nature, but the story is humanist.
+A true marvel you owe yourself to experience.