Kosmonaut Zero [Kindle Edition]

Dark and brooding but with a heart breaking human core. Kosmonaut Zero explores the factual barbarity and clinical cruelty of the cold war whilst bringing a mind blowing creativity that stretches the imagination to its limits.
The author has a beautifully descriptive writing style and brings the characters to life so well that you feel you know them. This only heightens the emotion of the sometimes brutal treatment which the heroine is subjected to.
Occasionally gruesome but utterly compelling!

Little did Aristoteles know how his ideas of governing polis would transform over the next two-thousand and so years. Politics in general has become a mechanism enabling mass management and manipulation, rather than protecting the individual's rights and livelihood. Look at the popularity of Occupy- movement - people do feel powerless in front of institutions where no one seemingly is in charge. How do you possibly make ethical decisions when you're given roughly two options, one as bad as the other? I will not go further with this history of politics malarchy, since I began writing a review on an excellent science fiction e-book by Richard Evans.
Politics, mass management and manipulation are interesting themes throughout the novel so your humble reviewer is not wandering to a dead-end sidetrack here.It's all lies, lies, lies! In Evans's Kosmonaut Zero the reader finds it hard to determine for the web of characters who to trust and what goes on behind closed doors. Always a bonus, in fiction at least. One thing that comes to Kosmonaut Zero's characters rescue is the printed word - files marked top secret, naturally - and hopefully this e-book - not top secret by any means - will do the trick for you as it did for me. I couldn't put my laptop down for a second.

Main events in Kosmonaut Zero are set in the Soviet Russia of late 1960s. Evans is very talented in creating atmospheres. It is one thing to describe a building so that it jumps off the page, but a completely different thing to create a realistic surrounding that conveys the political, social and economical context of the setting.
This future is concrete and stone, asphalt and angles. Celestial blue buses are timetabled for the people, snaking along the street below her grey apartment block. Everything is small, everyone is distant. The city is a clockwork mechanism. She imagines herself down there, a stick figure in the snow, a cog in the dark city.
Here is the very paradox of this speculative communist state - you are alone in the crowd. One tiny piece of instrument in the mass machinery that ticks, ticks, ticks - day in, day out, like a clockwork. Perhaps the urban alienation is not restricted just to communist states in the past - take a good look around Monday morning on a crowded Central line tube carriage and tell me there is a strong sense of community somewhere there. Or if you're not London-based, choose any metropolis you wish. Or take your humble reviewer's word for it.

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