Snuff - Utopie – Pelevin Viktor (2016)

In the grotesque post-apocalyptic novel SNUFF, Viktor Pelevin combines a unique social satire with a sharp caricature of the current geopolitical landscape. Damilola Karpov is a combat pilot-cameraman from Byzantium, a gigantic wealthy city that hovers over the backward and barbaric Urkaina. Through his footage, he contributes to maintaining constant war tension and shaping an artificial reality. By narrating the fates of two young Ukrainian Orcs and one Byzantine cybernetic woman with cutting-edge artificial intelligence, Damilola reveals to us a mosaic of social manipulations, the mechanisms of media enslavement, and the distortion of a decadent era, where pornography and the death of the viewer bore us, and films have grown into a religious ritual. The novel contains many references to today's social and political conditions in Russia and the West, and against the backdrop of their mutual animosity, it raises questions about the connections between wars and media, the nature of the entertainment industry, and the relationship between humanity and technology.