Yellow Blue Tibia: A Novel

by Adam Roberts Narrated by Roger Davis

Overview

Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth ... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story must be so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes in it--the population of the whole world!' The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working on it.

But then new orders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin has changed his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get on with their lives in their various ways; some of them survive the remainder of Stalin's rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has started to happen. The story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true ...

A typically mind-blowing SF novel from one of the genre's literary stars.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

At the end of World War II, translator and would-be sf writer Konstantin Andreiovich Skvorecky, along with several colleagues, meets secretly with Soviet leader Josef Stalin to create a fictional "alien attack" in the hopes of uniting the disparate groups within the Communist Party against a common foe. Forty years later, the attack seems to be coming true. British sf author Roberts (Gradisil) demonstrates his knack for quirkily speculative fiction, with elegant plot twists, seriocomic passages, and a suitably gullible protagonist whose instincts see him through to the end. VERDICT Wildly imaginative yet delivering the absurdist punch associated with Kafka and Orwell, this novel of high spirits disguised as fact provides a field day for the literary enthusiast as well as the UFO fan.

From the Publisher

"Gripping, captivating, wonderfully funny and magnificently written, completely mess-with-your-head weird. Fantastically evocative of what life was like in Soviet Russia, packed with telling details. Robert's style is beautifully crafted, his dialogue is superb, his characterization perfect. This is a book you've got to read."  —SFX

"From the opening act in the dacha and the banter between the five SF writers, to the scenes in Moscow and the action and aftermath in Kiev and Chernobyl, Yellow Blue Tibia is at times unbelievably funny, and is just a romp and very accessible. Superb and I can't recommend it enough."  —Fantasy Book Critic

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159434760
Publisher:	Octopus Books
Publication date:	08/24/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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