Kill Motorola

About the novel by Vladimir Pokrovsky "Personal Detective"

Vladimir Pokrovsky is an author with experience, but only chosen fans of the science fiction genre were familiar with his works. It is all the more curious that his novel “Personal Detective” finally reached the publishing house designed for a mass reader. The fact that his reader is waiting is in the material of Vasily Vladimir, written specifically for Gorky.

Starting from February 24, 2022, we were all in the face of the advancing barbarism, violence and lies. In this situation, it is extremely important to preserve at least the remnants of culture and support the values ​​of humanism - including for the sake of the future of Russia. Therefore, the editorial office of Gorky will continue to talk about books, reminding our readers that the world remains in the world and fiction.

Vladimir Pokrovsky. Personal detective. M.: Mainstream, AST, 2024

Vladimir Pokrovsky is an author with a difficult trajectory of a literary career.

In the 1970-1980s-the star of the Moscow, and then the All-Union Maleevsky seminars of young fantasy writers.

The author of the well -known in the narrow circles of the novel “Dances of Men” and the novel “Hairdressing Guys”, whose manuscripts wandered around the Soviet fandom for years, spreading legends and fans.

One of those thanks to whom the first publications of Victor Pelevin took place. Although Eduard Gevorkyan managed to print the debut Pelevin miniature “Sorcerer Ignat and People” in “Science and Religion” earlier, it was with the presentation of Pokrovsky in the journal “Knowledge-Power” that the stories “Crystal World”, “The USSR Taishau Zhuan”, “The Creger’s Frank” and a fragment from the romance of Room Ra ”appeared.

A writer with a unique style, a specific handwriting, equally not like science fiction and realists.

And until recently - the author of just one book, the collection "Planet of deferred death", published back in 1998. Even the New Horizons Award in 2020 for the story “Fake Elephant” Vladimir Pokrovsky received “by manuscript”, that is, for the “samizdat” publication with a circulation of 30 pieces.

Surprisingly, he did not abandon to write: from 1996 to 2019, Pokrovsky finished at least five large stories and the huge novel “Personal Detective”, which in 2024 finally saw the light in the series with the meaningful name “Fiction of the Future”.

With the future, Pokrovsky is fine - in the sense, with the image of this future: the author paints it in detail, thoughtfully and painstakingly. “Detective” - science fiction, psychological science fiction, social fantasy and to some extent philosophical fantasy in one bottle. The story of the era, when humanity has long settled among the stars, but not a cosmic action movie and not another novel about progressors, a rare enduring subspecies - if not the Amur tiger, then at least the mountain gorilla of our "genre" literature. Perhaps the closest analogy here, if you can’t do without references - the prose of Stanislav Lem times of the “Memoirs of Eyon Tikho”, the novels “Futurological Congress”, “Inspection on the spot” and “Peace on Earth”. The same eccentric combination of the tragic and comic, the same sudden paradox, reaching the point of absurdity, is the same violent word formation: “glass” instead of films and books, “machinations” instead of cars, “hnects” instead of hackers, et cetera, et cetera.

Pokrovsky moves from simple to complex. In the world of the future, which he describes with such a hobby, each planet, each populated satellite and spaceship controls its artificial intelligence-they call them here by scooters (I risk assuming, in honor of the IT company, which was pulled into pieces of Google and Lenovo in the 2010s). At the same time, in the society of the future attitude towards sparks, to put it mildly, ambiguous. On the one hand, they are almost deified: “Motorola knows everything, everything can and everything can predict, Motorola is always right, the vast majority of the recommendations of the motorlax is fundamentally unknowable” and so on. On the other hand, there is an interplanetary organization that is ready at the slightest hint of inaccuracy to re -bathe the artificial mind, erase the personality, simply put, to kill the motorcycle, completely legal and officially. Finally, citizens of the beautiful world of the future completely and reflexively dislike the sparks, like any power with a claim to absolutism, but hackers-chronkes, single revolutionaries, on the contrary, secretly romanticize. And most of all - Donizetti Walhov, simply Don, the “enemy of the number one society”, the most clever cracker in the inhabited universe, masterfully possessing a set of voice teams that can confuse almost any artificial mind.

Actually, Don’s virtuoso shoot from places of imprisonment and a “personal detective” begins, but from a light adventurous-adventure NF-Roman, it quickly grows into something more bizarre and strange. “Detective” is a novel about power, revolution and love, suppression and emancipation, death and self -sacrifice. Not without anti -utopia elements, of course:

“Night shots, heart -rending cries - all this is not terror, dear friends. <...> Terror is the stupidity in which you are forced to believe, these are tight -fitting varnish armored vehicles of comrades, deliberately storing the crowd, these are the corpses of the executed just in case, then crushed to molecules in city garbage bin, <...> This is a constant dream of a simple calm life, even without order, it is a constant expectation of help, it is absolutely noble from whom.

“A very funny novel,” writer Alexander Etheev comments in Blerb on the back of the cover. Really, I joked so joked.

Vladimir Pokrovsky sprinkles with paradoxes, juggles with ideas, twists them like that, examines genre cliches from all sides until he gets tired. The ingenious hacker against omnipotent artificial intelligence - trivial, beaten, was already a hundred times already. But what if Iskin has long moved off the coils, and the hacker is drawn into this fight against the desire? So much more interesting. Personal transplant? Trite, trunk. Now, if you transplant the same personality to several million people at once, men and women, children and the elderly, and see how they will get out, this is a completely different matter. And so on: the author reveals the possibilities that conceal quite familiar plot moves, combines, splash, brings to the point of absurdity and grotesque. That is, he does the same as one of the secondary (and far from the most charming) characters of the novel:

“He was fascinated by Burleske of ideas, which were adopted into something whole extremely rarely, but if they had already gripped, it came out the devil knows what it is, that everything gasped. More precisely, he would have ahaled if they wanted to know and delve into. ”

The main question is whether readers want to know and delve into. The non -conformist with half -century experience, Vladimir Pokrovsky deliberately breaks the narrative mechanism, debugged with generations of writers, with crunch and gingerbread, twists levers and sixes from the dashboard. The same personal detective, in whose honor the novel is named, the personal Nemesis and the indefatigable pursuer of Don Walhov, for example, actively enters the game only on the five hundredth page, closer to the final. An uneven, confusing, saturated with repetitions, conversational speech pours a stream - live, non -unit, filled with optional retreats and sudden swirls of thought. But all this the author perfectly sees himself, even comments directly in the text:

“Even if to the detriment of the dynamics of the narrative, but a few words should still be said about Brijoakhin. Moreover, this is the only reason to say something about him, because in the future he will no longer take any participation in the plot. ”

In fact, the “personal detective” is a huge bike with a volume of 800 pages, “the story told by the fire”, this is her charm, its attractive force. The ancient form of the narrative and the future with all its Oners, with instant bioonic ligaments through the hollow, with caravans of missiles, rushing, naturally, from star to star, with these very sorcerers-modoles-the combination is unusual, in a sense, even shocking. They usually do not expect this from science fiction, it is clear why the novel could not find the publisher for more than ten years.

On the other hand, it is thanks to this combination of the incompatible “personal detective” that is not outdated in ten years - unlike many other fantastic books, which at one time more successfully fit into the traditional format.

Well, the light, comfortable, comforting reading of Vladimir Pokrovsky never promised anyone - here it would be necessary to move the brain gyrus, sryry.