Metro 2033 (novel)

Metro 2033 (Russian: Метро 2033) is a 2002 post-apocalyptic fiction novel by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It is set within the Moscow Metro, where the last survivors hide after a global nuclear holocaust. It has been followed by two sequels, Metro 2034 and Metro 2035, and spawned the Metro media franchise. The book's English edition was published as a tie-in with its video game adaptation in 2010.

Synopsis

Background

In 2013, a nuclear war forced a large amount of Moscow's surviving population to relocate to the city's Metro system in search of refuge. Eventually, communities settled within the underground train stations and developed into independent states over time. Factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the "Rangers of the Order", to the neo-Stalinist Red Line faction and the neo-Nazi Fourth Reich, to the more powerful factions such as Polis, which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the Commonwealth of Ring Stations (nicknamed Hansa, after the Hanseatic League), which controlled the main ring of metro stations through its sheer economic power.

As these groups began to evolve, the Red Line and the Fourth Reich quickly entered a state of war, as both sought to destroy the other. As the war raged, the stations that refused to join either side were either demolished by the factions, merged into the Hansa regime, raided by criminal bandits, or formed their own independent states. Other stations were outright destroyed by animals, mutated by the nuclear fallout.