In Russia it is direct, obvious and clear. “That the banks, the government and the press are all partial to a conspiracy against the people – there are only hints to that end in Europe. With that out of the way, how does this explain the sudden changes of Metro 2035? Well, the Dark Ones were a topic that moved Glukhovsky back in 2002, a topic that has stopped moving him now.īut what is it that made him write Metro 2035?īy the way, this is the point where you stop reading if you haven’t read the novel yet. The whole story of Hanza, Artjom and D-2 is beautiful enough already, but there is something more behind it.

It has to stay readable for another ten, twenty or fifty years, and for that everything needs to stay a bit abstract.” This is where the Metro franchise goes beyond genre fiction – “Forget tension”. This is the power of Science Fiction, as Glukhovsky himself notes: “When you write a book, it shouldn’t be too direct, not too much drawn from the particular period.

As for the monsters, Glukhovsky explicitly says that for him, they are a “metaphor for ‘the Other’” Metro 2033 becomes a novel about the fear of all variations of it. He gets to meet a few mutants, but those aren’t the monsters.”īut why is that? Isn’t the Metro series about the aftermath of civilisation, about the human will to survive even in the post-apocalyptic mess they put themselves into, as put by Hunter in his speech to Artjoms step-father in the beginning of Metro 2033? Aren’t the monsters kind of important for that? Well, yes, kind of. Or, as Glukhovsky puts it, “this novel is about humans. I’m not spoiling very much (it’s mentioned in the first chapter) when I say that in Metro 2035, there are no monsters. There’s also the whole issue of the monsters. That is understandable when you think about the fact that not all, but some of them are teenagers who want an adrenaline kick.” However, out there are a lot of Science Fiction fans who only want to read adventure novels. For example, when asked about his stance on Science Fiction, Glukhovsky answers: “For me, Science Fiction is a tool to express things that move me.

I’ll translate some of the juicier quotes. So I looked him up and found this interview on, a German website – Glukhovsky speaks German fluently (along with English, French, Hebrew, Spanish and of course Russian). I wanted to know what it was that made him write the novel the way he did. But after I had finished my nearly uninterrupted binge, I paused and looked up Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author of the by now famous Dystopian novels from Russia. When I picked up Metro 2035 in a local bookshop a few weeks ago, I could hardly wait to rush through the book (which I did, in three days) – it has been quite some time since Metro 2034 and even longer since Metro 2033.

Metro 2035 english