European Literature
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#RivetingReviews: Paul Burke reviews MY BROTHER THE MESSIAH by Martin Vopenka

My Brother the Messiah is a philosophical novel set in a post-apocalyptic world, between eighty and one hundred and fifty years in the future. Humanity has walked with open arms into climate catastrophe. Large parts of the world are uninhabitable and the surviving societies are fragmented and isolated from each other. Rather than striving for a new future, life remains bound by the strictures of the past: old religion and science, corrupt models of government and a faded understanding of philosophy. Sadly, this is still a world of division and conflict. In hope more than expectation past follies are rehashed, inevitably leading humanity down a cul-de-sac in which history repeats itself.

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The Times

SCIENCE FICTION

The best science fiction for February 2021 – miracles and messiahs in a frozen future

Politics and spirituality collide in Simon Ings’s top sci-fi choice

Early in the 22nd century a Slav religious community ekes out a living among the frostbitten olive groves of northern Greece. They’re better off than most. A botched technological attempt to fix climate change has caused a new ice age. Scandinavia has become a land of perpetual snow; countries turn to dictators to protect them, or to religious leaders to give them hope.

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Morning Star
Review

FICTION

My Brother the Messiah – Thought-provoking parable of dystopian times to come

MARTIN VOPENKA’S previous novel The Fifth Dimension is a troubling, comfortless and problematic book — and that description largely applies to the Czech writer’s latest, in an astringent translation by Anna Bryson Gustova.

Written from the viewpoint of protagonist Marek, My Brother the Messiah weaves back and forth across the decades of a dystopian 22nd century.

During that time, a botched technological attempt to arrest global warming has resulted instead in a new ice age. As polar conditions spread southwards, massive European migrations begin as Scandinavians head to the centre of the continent and then, as conditions worsen, whole Czech and Austrian populations escape in turn to Greece.

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