The History of the GalaxyThe fog and the Layer, the hypersphere and the Great Exodus, the Terran Alliance’s war and its machines, and where the three English books fall, on one page.See the history →

Three Books, Four Centuries

The History of the Galaxy was never planned. Livadny, born in 1969 and raised near St Petersburg, signed his first contract with Eksmo in 1997; in 2002 he arranged novels he had already written into one consistent line, and his overview of January 2017 counts sixty works, eighty-three planets, sixteen alien races, the Great Exodus and two Galactic Wars. His English publisher’s catalogue says the series has “only one protagonist: the human race itself”, and the author told Magic Dome in 2017:

“I made a point of not specifying which nation colonized the Galaxy”

The history runs like this. In the twenty-second century four corporations rule an Earth whose biosphere has died; its cities drown in industrial fog, and billions live sealed in capsules, spending their lives in a cyberspace called the Layer. The theory of the hypersphere opens the stars, and in the Great Exodus thousands of colony transports leave over half a century, most of them on blind jumps that scatter their crews across thousands of star systems. Centuries later a rebuilt, overcrowded Earth under John Winston Hammer’s Terran Alliance turns on the colonies its emigrants founded, and in 2607 begins the First Galactic War, which by the author’s chronology lasts thirty years and ends with the Alliance’s capitulation. The Russian cycle runs on to the thirty-ninth century.

Magic Dome Books picked three novels from three points on that line, written in 2013, 2000 and 2007, and numbered them by the history: read in order, they move forward four hundred years and then seventeen. The cycle’s word for a jump into the hypersphere with no charts to steer by, «слепой рывок», a blind jump, is the Russian title of the first; the English renders it Blind Punch. The English series stopped at three; FantLab’s page for «Дабог» notes that, by the author’s account, its translation flopped.

I · Blind Punch (2017)

The Prologue opens on the Plaza of Five Corners in the Europe Megacity, where nobody stops for an unshaven street violinist except a woman in a dark blue evening dress, who applauds. She is Cathy Rimp, owner of Rimp Cybertronics, the world’s largest corporation; he is an artificial intelligence in a body of servotoys and foam flesh. Earth is days from war, and each of the four superpowers has secretly built an AI to run its combat robots. Rimp cuts his connection to the Net and tells him:

“We will leave the poisoned Earth behind. We will reach for the stars.”

He refuses to destroy the military AIs, which are not yet self-aware, so she asks him to play, and while he plays, a chip in his violin finds its way into the AI network and carries her program into the military AIs of four superpowers.

Chapter One is dated 12 November 2197. Max Bourne, who turns twenty tomorrow, wakes in his in-mode, one of five capsules hung under the ceiling of a refitted studio flat; his family has lived in in-modes for thirteen years. Four billion of Earth’s eighteen billion people live sealed like this and live their real lives in the Layer, a cyberspace of four tiers ranked by status; people in capsules are called cans. In the Layer Max has met Lisa, a plain, oddly mysterious student from the Upper Layer. She tells him the cruel truth: the cans fill the places of banned game bots, and he will stay in his capsule forever. Later she tells him “None of this is real,” leaves him her real-world number, and hints that her father made his fortune on the movement of industrial fog.

At twenty Max gets 5,000 credits from the World Government and spends them all hiring an expert neuronet, which predicts that the fog is about to drop in parts of the Europe Megacity. A private investor lends him 190,000 credits against his own and his parents’ in-modes and the family’s Antarctic rights, signed through his parents’ implants without their knowledge. Max buys ten empty capsule apartments, leaves the can rather than face his parents, and grows rich when the fog drops. “Above the clouds,” he tells a flycar.

That same morning Rimp asks Ulrich Fitzgerald, the old founder of Genesis, to help pay for the Alpha, the first interstellar colony transport; he shares her verdict on Earth but sets harsh terms, and Bryzgalov of Megapool orders the ship sabotaged at its launch. There the publisher’s English excerpt ends.

The rest is known from the blurb, Russian reviews and the author’s notes. The blurb promises military AIs and survival in the distant Outlands; reviewers recall a Robinson Crusoe stretch on Ganymede, space pirates, and the theory of the hypersphere with the first flights through it. By the end, the author’s notes say, Cathy Rimp leaves the dying Earth on a colony transport with her corporation’s specialists, the engineer Hans Gervet among them, and Max survives; Livadny says his hero “faced a life-threatening emergency and came out the winner”. The book I page walks it movement by movement.

II · The Shadow of Earth (2018)

Four hundred years on, the fog is gone. “Earth was an eternal city”: one technosphere over every continent, sixty billion people, four in five of them on subsidies. John Winston Hammer, the short man who heads the World Government, founded the Terran Alliance with five ancient warships and an ice-hauler pilot from the Belt, Alexander Nagumo, whose price was the title of admiral. Every accessible world within one hyperjump was settled in the Exodus, and Earth decides to take one anyway: Dabog, a thriving farming colony founded by the transport Fugitive, to be struck from orbit as an example to every colony.

On 9 October 2607 a young teacher, Daria Kretchetova, brings her class to the Colonization History Museum, where holograms show the colony’s founders and Aquila, the Rokotov family’s walking farm machine. Overhead three cruisers, black under their phantom generators, lead the Terran fleet in; one of them, the Shadow of Earth, gives the book its English title. Its megacity killers find the ancient reactors buried under two cities, and two mushroom clouds climb into the stratosphere.

Igor Rokotov, thirty-seven, a historian of the colony, keeps the restored Aquila in the museum’s hangar. He finds Daria and the children in the dark, fits the tunnelling lasers he had readied for an anniversary show, leaves them sealed in, and walks the machine out into crimson clouds and falling ash. Through Aquila’s hidden cryptographic subsystem he hears the Terran major at the capital order the bunker seals blown or gas pumped into the shelters. Ambushed by a combat vehicle, he cuts it apart, and with that first kill, the narrator says, the Galactic War began. Nagumo orders an orbital barrage on top of his own troops; Aquila walks through it, and one antique farm machine breaks a fleet’s landing. The surviving ships lift off and abandon their assault teams, and Igor ends Part 1 unconscious in the crippled machine.

Past Part 1 the book is known only from summaries and trope wikis. They agree that the landing is beaten and that nuclear strikes ruin Dabog’s biosphere, though not on when they fall (one gives it a century to recover); one wiki follows a Terran soldier, very probably Andrew Groves, jailed since the age of five, who ends up fighting the invaders. The attack meant to frighten the colonies unites them, and a week-long blitzkrieg becomes the thirty-year First Galactic War. What becomes of Igor and Daria, the sources do not say. The book II page follows the first day almost hour by hour.

III · Servobattalion (2018)

Seventeen years later, in what the book calls the fifteenth year of the war, the Alliance has still not taken the developed colonies. The Prologue, dated 2627 in the English, comes after the battle the book is about: on the volcanic world Vesuvius, a repaired Hoplite whose AI will not speak to its test pilot throws him out on the emergency catapult and runs the test course alone. Its AI, the range chief explains, lost her pilot in the last battle; most of the batch came from the Thirteenth Servobattalion.

On 25 June 2624 two hundred recruits aged seventeen to nineteen land on Yunona, Book II’s dead colony, now a weapons laboratory hidden under pines that grow ten metres a year. They are kids from Earth’s megacities, picked for their scores at servomachine combat in the Layer’s tournament arena, and their captain tells them quietly:

“There may be no living combat companions beside you, only machines.”

Simon Green, cocky and slangy, and Anton Verkholin, skinny and watchful, decide to stick together. On 18 July Hammer dies and the old Nagumo takes his offices, and Admiral Kupanov, seeing a chance to rise, briefs his fleet for a raid on Ankor, a Colonial world where captured Alliance servomachines are studied. The designer Howard Faragney, whose Maverick AIs learn from pilots wired into them, has built his newest, Beatrice-4, which no longer filters the pilot’s thoughts; Major Herpack calls him a killer, and Faragney thinks himself cursed.

On 12 August twenty of the two hundred, Simon and Anton among them, go to war in the Thirteenth Servobattalion, each sub-unit under a seasoned officer. Seven Nibelung carriers, posing as a Colonial convoy the Alliance has already seized, codes and all, slip through Ankor’s defences and drop the battalion’s machines in armoured containers onto the bunker zone, where their landing jets raise a black cloud that blinds the watchers in orbit. There the Russian preview runs out, with Simon’s container jammed and, at last, a voice on the net.

From here the book is known from annotations and reviews: the battalion fights for Ankor for a single day, in long, closely detailed battles of walking machines; the operation’s real purpose, the Russian annotation says, turns out to be something quite different, and two reviews point to treachery from above. By the end, one reviewer writes, all the main heroes die or pass to another stage of development, which recalls the blurb’s promise of a pilot’s mind living on in the machine. As the blurb puts it:

“The war of humans is gradually transforming into a war of machines.”

The book III page walks the day as far as the sources reach.

One History

The three books were written out of order and sold as standalones, but they share one history, and the English editions keep its threads tied.

The first runs from Earth to Dabog. In 2016 Livadny revised the Russian ending of «Слепой рывок» so that the transport Rimp’s people leave on is the Fugitive, the ship that founds Dabog; «Беглец» (2019), the novel of its voyage, is untranslated. The Shadow of Earth reaches back across the gap. Its museum keeps the Fugitive’s armour plate; Daria names the founders, Max Bourne, Catherine Rimp, her daughter Chloe and the engineer Hans Gervet; and Igor has found the diaries of Max Bourne, who became the pilot of the very first servomachine on Dabog. The Russian calls that pilot Ivan Stozharov, as it calls Blind Punch’s hero, and the English calls them both Max Bourne. Earth remembers Fitzgerald, who cleared its air and emptied the in-modes, and keeps the four corporations as half-erased logos on Hammer’s first warships.

The second is the war’s high command. Hammer’s decision starts the war, and Nagumo commands the strike on Dabog from the flagship Endgrouse, with the young admiral Tiberius Nadyrov under him. In Servobattalion Hammer dies and Nagumo takes his offices; its flashbacks make Nadyrov Nagumo’s rival in the war’s early years, and Admiral Kupanov began his career on the Endgrouse’s artillery deck in that first attack.

The third is the machines, and the word servo grows with them. In Blind Punch servos are small service robots that scrub façades. On Dabog, Gervet built the first servomachine from the giant loader that stripped the Fugitive’s armour, with the bionics of the planet’s great lizards, and every family came to own one; Aquila is the Rokotovs’. After the defeat at Dabog the Alliance shows its engineers walking war machines of its own, made “as an analogy for the walking servomachines of Dabog”, and the first Maverick AIs lose one fight after another to Dabog’s refitted farm walkers. Faragney’s answer is to wire a human pilot into the machine, and Beatrice is where that leads. The Layer runs through all three as well: the cans live in it in the first book, Fitzgerald has blocked it by the second, and in the third the Alliance picks its pilots from its arena.

Reading Them

Read them in the English order, which is the history’s: Blind Punch, The Shadow of Earth, Servobattalion. Each stands alone with its own cast and a complete story, but in order the second book’s museum remembers people the reader has met, and the third book’s machines carry the second book’s war in their design. Start with Blind Punch, which builds the Earth the other two remember.

Between the first and second books lies «Беглец», the untranslated middle of the Russian trilogy «Слепой рывок» – «Беглец» – «Дабог», so in English the Fugitive’s voyage happens offstage. Between the second and third the Russian cycle has five more episodes, and one of them is in English: The Island of Hope («Остров Надежды», 1997), Magic Dome’s first Livadny translation, published in 2015 without the series label. All three novels are on audio from Tantor, read by Aaron Shedlock.

The History →

The whole walk: The Series · The History · I · II · III