At the attempts to locate science fiction into a tight conceptual grid it often happens that all the definitions fade and moreover blur the stereotypical schemes of perception and thought.
Science fiction fans are well aware of the harm which "science-fiction mass consumption products" do to this genre.
Heroes there are substituted with schemes (even super-schemes), supermen with crystal-clear and empty soul.
With stagy ease these "heroes" use their abilities in time and space, unlimited even by common sense.
Cinematography did not go far beyond from the publishers in this sense, making new "supermen" and new "star massacres" rich with dynamics which are made at a really fantastic technical level.
Therefore, the appearance of such work as a novel by Andrey Demidov "The Natotevaal Recruits" should become a significant, and even iconic event not only in the paradigm of fiction, but of the literary process in general.
Why are we talking about literature in general in this case?
Because literature is always a non-fictional (and sometimes distorted) reflection of the present.
But can we say that works of fiction genre reflect the future?
No, we cannot.
The present is refracted and repeated in a special form in them.
The future – is just a prism through which science fiction writer considers his time, his contemporaries. However, this prism still allows the readers to see features of future in the present.
That is why we can confidently say that fiction helps a person in a world, that is changing with tremendous speed, especially nowadays, when the rate of change has dramatically increased, and all these changes can be both beneficial as well as threatening to the mankind.
Fiction, that describes possible changes, prepares a person for a real change and helps either to adjust to it or to change oneself.
But are these changes of human nature really needed and are they possible?
We live in a world, predicted by science fiction writers decades ago.
Andrey Demidov’s protagonists live in a world, the suppositions of which we are making today, the premises of which we can see even now.
It is a world in which the most formidable predictions of science fiction writers and futurists have come true.
A world, in which nuclear weapons have been brought into play, killing millions of people and a world, where the survivors envy the dead.
This is a world where Christian and Muslim civilizations meet in a deadly combat, a world in which tolerance and liberalism have been completely refuted.
This is the world where the danger of physical, intellectual and moral degradation of the mankind as a whole – is an obvious fact, the everyday reality of life.
Essentially, it is a world without a future.
Andrey Demidov’s heroes do not even get a chance to think about the future.
They have other problems to deal with.
Their past is war, their present is war, and their future – mysterious, enigmatic and unknown – will most likely result in war.
War – is the occupation of the novel's characters.
They are fighting for their race, their land, their families, but by chance they will have to take part in battles of a totally different level.
In childhood, joyfully shooting the space fleet of "the evil empire" on cheap game consoles, the novel's characters naively believed that monstrous plans of "Star Wars" would be carried out somewhere far away from Earth and certainly never dreamed of being at the forefront of these space wars, but soon… In a while they are going to find themselves taking part in a totally different war:
