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.
