Anna Starobinets
| Zhivushchi | The Living. Dystopian Novel. AST. Moscow 2011. 286 pages |
| Foreign rights: | Bulgaria/ Zhar, Croatia/ Hangar 7, Czech/ Albatros, Spain/ Impedimenta |
The world as we know it has ended. After the Great Reduction, the population of the earth remains fixed at three billion people. Nobody dies: At the end of their lives, people are reborn somewhere in the world. An incarnation code contains information about your past lives. There are no more individuals, each human being is nothing more than an element in a larger consciousness, called The Living. Mankind has become a single, constantly reproducing organism.
In this world there are no countries, cities and borders, religions and nations, wars and terror. Every person can be reborn anywhere on the planet, issuing from their previous incarnations rather than biological parents. Society is global, and attach- ment to parents and children is denounced as a deviation. It‘s a wonderful, stable world where each individual always has a connection to the community. A central brain decides everything: where people live, what their work will look like, how long they can survive in their current incarnation...
Until suddenly a being with no code is born, a baby with no past – a spare human being. His birth increases the population by one and threatens the entire system. Who is this being? Friend or foe? This is the question Zero himself is desperate to answer. From early childhood he shows deviations. He is attached to his mother; he is loved by pets, who normally are scared of The Living. After his mother’s death he is sent to the correction center where kids with bad “karma” are kept. There he makes friends with Cracker, who actually invented Socio in one of his previous incarnations. Cracker helps Zero to flee and to eventually find out that this whole comfortable, logical, and fair world rests on lies. It is probable that even the proverbial “incarnation” is just a result of astute manipulation.
