Ice is at the center of Vladimir Sorokin's epic Ice Trilogy, which is also published by NYRB Classics. Moscow has been hit by a wave of brutal murders. The victims are of both sexes, from different backgrounds, and of all ages, but invariably blond and blue-eyed. They are found with their breastbones smashed in, their hearts crushed. There is no sign of any motive. Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common herd of humanity, they must be awakened and set free. How? With a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. Humans, meat machines, die under its blows. The hearts of the chosen answer by uttering their true names. For the first time they know the ecstasy of true life. For the awakened, the future, like the past, is simple. It is ice. What is Ice ? A gritty dispatch from the front lines of the contemporary world, a gnostic fairy tale, a hard-boiled parable, a New Age parody, a bitingly funny fantasy in the great Russian tradition that begins with Gogol and continues with Nabokov, a renegade fiction to set beside those of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq, and the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet by Vladimir Sorokin, the stylistic virtuoso and master of provocation who, in the words of The Moscow Times, is “the only living Russian author who can be called a classic.”

This new novel by Vladimr Sorokin is a full-fledged work that is also a prequel to the events described in his other novel Led (Ice), also available.

Die Auserwählten der Bruderschaft wissen: Die Erde ist allein im Universum, sie ist ein Unikum. Und der Homo sapiens ist ein Unikum hoch zwei oder drei. Wenn dem aber so ist, muss man die Erde als Störfall ansehen, als Schandfleck am Leib des Universums.Als Erweckte des Lichts sind sie fast am Ziel, diesen missratenen Himmelskörper, diese von Sex und Gewalt verdorbene Erde, für alle Zeit auszulöschen - um selbst als 23 000 Strahlen in die körperlose Ewigkeit einzugehen. Dabei sprechen ihre erweckten Herzen von Liebe und meinen doch nur rohe Gewalt, Mord und die Vernichtung allen Lebens. Wer sich ihnen in den Weg stellt, endet im automatisierten Albtraum kapitalistischer Verwertungsketten.Auch im letzten Band der viel diskutierten LJOD-Trilogie schwingt Sorokin den Eishammer. In einer Welt der Reproduktion und des Konsums lässt er Heilversprechen, Erweckungsphantasien und den Wahn kommerzialisierter Glückssuche ungebremstaufeinanderkrachen.Mal Thriller, mal Gangsterroman, mal lyrisch-pathetischer Hymnus - Sorokin zieht erneut alle Register seines enormen sprachlichen Repertoires. Er spielt in seinem schon legendär gewordenen Mimikry-Stil mit Sprache und Genres und beweist einmal mehr sprachliche Gewandtheit, erzählerische Bravour und einen ausgeprägten Sinn für das Absurde.

A New York Review Books Original In 1908, deep in Siberia, it fell to earth. THEIR ICE. A young man on a scientific expedition found it. It spoke to his heart, and his heart named him Bro. Bro felt the Ice. Bro knew its purpose. To bring together the 23,000 blond, blue-eyed Brothers and Sisters of the Light who were scattered on earth. To wake their sleeping hearts. To return to the Light. To destroy this world. And secretly, throughout the twentieth century and up to our own day, the Children of the Light have pursued their beloved goal. Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.