Review of Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

There is a wonderfully expressive idiom in Polish: to paint the grass green. I don't know the etymology, but instinct tells me this is left over from communist times, times when the appearance of things was more important than the reality of things. Comrade big boss visiting? Ok, we can do this. Get things presentable. Get your stories straight with everyone. Falsify the reports to look good. Make sure the motivational slogans are appealing... Interrogating the space between this paint brush and the grass is Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia (2009).

Yellow Blue Tibia is a tale of Stalin's Soviet UFO program. In the years following WWII, the dictator commissioned a group of Russian science fiction writers, one being Konstantin Skovrecky, to write a story. Naturally these writers wanted to write a story that properly represented communism and the communist struggle against capitalism and the bourgeois West. Aliens would represent anti-Soviet interests, and as the USA had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, why not make them radiation aliens? But just as soon as Stalin commissioned the story, he commanded the group lock the ideas away and never speak to anyone of their story again. Yellow Blue Tibia is Skovrecky's memoir of the decades following this command.

Where most science fiction and fantasy puts its feet together, hands to hips, and jumps into the ocean of the unreal, Roberts' novel slips just a toe or two into the waves, and does so in fashion that never lets the reader be 100% confident the toes got wet. Yellow Blue Tibia is the definition of slipstream fiction. To be clear, this is not magic realism. Roberts does not go absurd randomly, or waver between reality and surrealism. Skovrecky's story is presented as ostensibly real, with bits of the uncanny granting the novel a strong degree of suspense and mystery making the reader question what is really happening. Are there aliens?

The book's title, Yellow Blue Tibia, is a transliteration of 'I love you.' in Russian (apparently). This would seem to indicate a major theme of the book is the inherent subjectivity of communication, which in the book's case also includes propaganda and propagation of communist ideals (idylls?) every good Russian was required to keep in their heart, regardless of personal belief or morals. A place where truth gets lost, Roberts nicely parallels communism with science fiction—yet another place where the truth gets lost. The cult of Stalin and, say, Arthur C. Clarke's books do have something in common, strangely.

Roberts acknowledges in the novel's closing notes that Yellow Blue Tibia is an attempt to reconcile Stalin's UFO program with eyewitness accounts. I'm not sure he accomplishes this; the denouement is a touch hand-wavy. But certainly he does an excellent job highlighting how a society deprived of reliable facts twists itself into a reality that is, unfortunately, not fictional. When the grass can't be green, paint it green. Hide those problems. Cover up the starvation, poverty, etc.

In the end, Yellow Blue Tibia draws an entertaining analog between science fiction and the mixed truths of communism through the eyes of an aged man just trying to get on with life. There are a few over the top scenes and Russian stereotypes at work, but Roberts keeps the reader engaged by never removing the mask from his creation. Eerie, strange things happen, yet remain somewhere near plausibility, enough to keep the reader guessing, and interested what is under the mask. I would not consider this Roberts' most relevant piece of fiction, but it certainly has a niche and keeps the pages turning—something which a huge amount of fiction struggles to do.