Ice

By Vladimir Sorokin
Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell

Moscow has been hit by a wave of brutal murders. The victims are of both sexes, from different backgrounds, and of all ages, but invariably blond and blue-eyed. They are found with their breastbones smashed in, their hearts crushed. There is no sign of any motive.

Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common herd of humanity, they must be awakened and set free. How? With a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. Humans, meat machines, die under its blows. The hearts of the chosen answer by uttering their true names. For the first time they know the ecstasy of true life.

For the awakened, the future, like the past, is simple. It is ice. What is Ice? A gritty dispatch from the front lines of the contemporary world, a gnostic fairy tale, a hard-boiled parable, a New Age parody, a bitingly funny fantasy in the great Russian tradition that begins with Gogol and continues with Nabokov, a renegade fiction to set beside those of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq, and the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet by Vladimir Sorokin, the stylistic virtuoso and master of provocation who, in the words of The Moscow Times, is "the only living Russian author who can be called a classic."

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Reviews

A page-turner with provocative implications.
— Kirkus Reviews

In stripped down, pokerfaced prose, Sorokin registers a world in which the inhumanity of man to man is exploited by a murderous emerging race who are, by contrast, in sweet mutual harmony with one another. This is a Master and Margarita for the age of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
— Publishers Weekly

Ice is a fearless and moving work from contemporary Russia’s most imaginative writer. Sorokin pushes against the boundaries of religion and philosophy with results that are unforgettable, transfixing, and often scarily funny.
— Gary Shteyngart

Sorokin's successful thriller is a sophisticated and skillful deconstruction of a utopian project of human transformation... An important novel.
— World Literature Today

Also see:

The Slynx By Tatyana Tolstaya Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell In Tolstaya's vaudevillian-dystopian novel, set 200 years after an apocalyptic disaster destroys Russia, a lowly scribe is elevated to a life of privilege and becomes the bibliophile from hell. "A densely woven, thought-provoking fantasy"—Kirkus Reviews

Russian Writers Collection The Slynx, Ice, Envy, and The Stray Dog Cabaret

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