Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozenof the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countrysidesomewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few yearsaway, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massiveexternal threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction,he tells the writers: ’I want you to concoct a story about alienspoised to invade earth… I want it to be massively detailed, andcompletely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up,then we can create them. But when America is defeated, your story mustbe so convincing that the whole population of Soviet Russia believes init—the population of the whole world!’ The little group of writersgets down to the task and spends months working on it. But then neworders come from Moscow: they are told to drop the project; Stalin haschanged his mind; forget everything about it. So they do. They get onwith their lives in their various ways; some of them survive theremainder of Stalin’s rule, the changes of the 50s and 60s. And then,in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, becausesomething strange has started to happen. The story they invented in1946 is starting to come true… A typically mind-blowing SF novelfrom one of the genre’s literary stars.
