It’s been twenty years past Doomsday, and yet the survivors refuse to give up. This tiny underground world can only remind humans of an immense world they once were the masters of. The stations of Metro became city-states, and its citizens, torn apart by religions and ideologies are fighting for the now scarce commodities: air, water, and space. It’s there that they created a new world for themselves. It’s there, hundreds of feet below the ground, in the vaults of what was constructed as the world’s largest air-raids shelter that people try to outlive the end of the days. The only survivors of the last war were those who made it into the gates of the Metro, the subway system of Moscow city. Abandoned satellites hang lonely on the orbit. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the whole Metro - and maybe the whole of humanity. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared.Īrtyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. It was one of the Metro's best stations and still remains secure. VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line.

Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival.

It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. Man's time is over.Ī few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires.

More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation.

Dmitry glukhovsky books