have you had any water recently?

Book: Half Life of Valery K

Foreword for context:

I am a STEM professional with a very specific niche. I consume a lot of cold war history content for fun, especially related to nuclear topics. I would like to think this gives me a reasonable basis from which I can critique the plot, characters, and science presented.

If you enjoy Natasha Pulley, I should probably apologize in advance. (I won't-- the book was awful IMO; and this is from somebody who reads a lot of dry shit written by engineers.) This was my first and will be my only foray into her work because I don't think I have ever disliked a book this much. It was also my only form of entertainment on a 12 hr plane ride so I finished it out of spite and sheer disbelief. If you don't want to read somebody dunking on the book, don't read this.

Also TW: violence against women, mentions of sexual assault, poorly handled Nazis, and inaccurate science.

My take:

The Mayak site and the Kyshtym disaster fascinate me endlessly. If I find a book related to it, I try to read it. Needless to say, I learned that the Half Life of Valery K exists-- and I was very, very excited to get my mitts on a Cold War thriller. Unfortunately, I ran into three major problems with the book itself. Firstly, bad science. Second, weak research and no respect for the cultural setting. Third, bad character development.

The science offended me right down into my bones. It felt like every other chapter I was gobsmacked at the lack of understanding that could've been resolved by an internet search or consulting with a nerd that loves to overshare. I have a very firm stance that the internet exists and most info is free-- so it should be used. I honestly think that if somebody is going to write a character with a specific knowledge base, that should either make that character correct in-text or simply not touch on the material. You would think it's a simple ask, but Pulley fails horribly. I've got a laundry list of complaints and corrections, so below may not be an exhaustive list but it has some of the most egregious.

Chapter 4 misapplication of the banana equivalent dose. My first true "are you fucking kidding me" moment -- the concept was coined in the US after the fall of the USSR, for one. And for two, it's not an issue of "the potassium" but of potassium-40 which has a beta decay (and sometimrs electron capture, but there is no handheld neutrino detector that I know of). Said beta decay would not make it through the truck it's in (much less through a pile of 15k bananas, hello self-sheilding). If a detector (yes they would be using detectors and not dosimeters) were really set low enough to pick it up, it would've been screaming wildly from the area's background radiation. As a professional with training, Valery should have known that. And while I don't doubt that the truck would probably have been allowed to pass, Soviet regulations probably would've required dubious-effective decontamination by hosing the vehicle down first.

Chapter 4 clown ass take on Cs and Sr decay. One internet search away and you, for the price of free, can also see neither decay by neutron emission. Also what the hell is a neutron shard?? That does not exist and, as best I can tell, wasn't a thought in the USSR, either.

Chapter 10-- bro has radiation sickness without radiation burns? I can sort of let this one go. Only sort of. If the ground were severely contaminated with alpha and beta emitters (fission products, literally part of the problem and discussed in other chapters) and he got sick from sleeping on it, he's missing burns. Straight up wouldve had burns from contact with that ground for however long he slept. Even if it took a while to show up like a sunburn, it never does.

Chapter 11 EMP wave. Last I checked, an explosion of a storage tank containing fission products wouldn't fail electronics in the vicinity. Sure it could knock a transformer and cause a broader power failure, but it could not do what was attributed to it. And assuming a reactor failure when there was a very, very real chemical tank explosion is too much a flight of fancy while also being incredibly disrespectful to the history of the area. (Ask me about how a reactor failure couldve been inspired and then gone down. Hint: it still wouldn't have done what was attributed to it in the book.)

Let's talk Plutonium in Chapter 19. Without going into too much detail, 80% recovery is kind of a joke? Chemically, it's been mastered for many decades. That was figured out well before '63. So are we talking about whether material has been produced at weapons grade? That may be more accurate, but also presents another issue. The driving force behind this plot point (and why I agree with Resovskaya) is that there is supposedly enough plutonium kicking around in the ground for a catastrophic explosion. Weapons grade stuff wouldn't have been let go-- you can literally keep cycling it back through your chemical processing systems to get better yields. It probably wouldve been processed out until they got close to 99%+ recovery. And if it isnt weapons grade Plutonium, it probably STILL would've been saved for use in radiothermal generators (RTGs-- those things folks love to pop on satellites but that the Soviets used extensively to power remote radio towers used for defense communications and radar transmissions. Of which there are still many orphan sources throughout the former USSR.) If somebody else has a source for an 80% recovery quote, please hit me with it.

Also Chapter 19 and the concept of a thermonuclear detonation. Straight up does not work like that. At all. It turns out that prompt supercriticality in en explosive chain reaction is very, very difficult to achieve. Its why the high intensity explosives machined to go round bomb cores are so perfect and why the cores themselves are so perfect. You have to evenly condense quite a bit of material into a very, very small space for one of those mushroom-cloud explosions. Anything else and it probably just fails and you get a more traditional ordinance explosion. Also I would REALLY have to suspend my disbelief here based on the RTG discussion, but the best you might get is a criticality incident, which probably still wouldn't happen given the supposed dispersion. It is the most likely concern for water introduction since water is a moderator. (No, water introduction cannot cause a thermonuclear explosion however that has been set up. The famous Chernobyl failure was a steam explosion followed by core melt, not a thermonuclear explosion...)

Chapter 19 for a third time-- no the fission product cesium wouldn't do that. The whole driver behind the tank explosion in the Kyshtym accident was a thermal explosion with interaction between organic chemicals. That (and 6 years out in the world) would mean that all of the cesium and other fission products have settled into various chemical states. That means it's all been reacted. So no, there should be no bubbling nor explosions. Learning that was the justification REALLY annoyed me. Chemical compounds don't magically become unreacted for a plot device. It is genuinely a pain in the ass to recover items back to a pure state intentionally. For a chemically reactive species like cesium, it would be impossible.

Chapter 33 and the TEMU demon core. Listen, I was seething over this and I still am. Super doubtful a production facility would have a criticality test source. On top of that doubt, there is no such thing as smuggling a source like that from any nuclear installation. That goes against even the barest tenants of nuclear security that would've existed during a super paranoid era in weapons production. These are lab facilities people wouldn't have even been bringing lunchboxes into-- and something of that size can't be smuggled out on a human body that the guards would know. AND THEN even if you assume it somehow was removed, who in their right PROFESSIONAL mind would look at something like a metal sphere in a reflector and think it anything but trouble? The idea of a clockwork mechanism is also insanity, as would be putting one together OVERNIGHT. AND THEN ASSUMING THAT THE VICTIMS OF THAT MURDER ATTEMPT WOULDN'T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT HAPPENED is incredibly stupid and misinformed. Like criticality accidents release HEAT and a blue glow caused by the speed of electrons moving thru the human cornea. Yes, you can experience the Cherenkov effect in your corneas. Valery should've been put down like the stupid dog he was the second he walked back into that space. Radiation is not magic and the physics it not a mystery. It is one EASY INTERNET SEARCH AND WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AWAY.

With everything Valery has gotten wrong, that is probably why he was thrown in the Gulag and not a sharashka. Granted, the setting of the book in 1963 is after the main era of gulag use-- if Valery weren't an ideological prisoner, he probably should've been let out. And the shrashkas were out of the picture a decade before the book's setting. So this brings me to point 2: this book is so, so historically inaccurate in a way that is incredibly disrespectful to the real events that happened and the people that suffered because of it.

Like the language and culture is way too British. Coffee? In a tea loving country? Hoovering? A fucking land rover that should've been a Moskvitch? Seriously. The internet is so, so easy to find and close these little details on. The car selection is Moskvitch slander.

Reading a supposed KGB agent as a little old lady say "loose lips sink ships" had me frothing at that mouth-- that would've had her jailed! That is a WWII American propaganda slogan.

Not to mention the infantilization of the Vory during Valery's time in the gulag. These hardened criminals totally needed some easily bullied loser to believe in them just enough to learn to read and write uwu. Fuck that.

All of that pales in comparison, though, to the weird mix of Pulley's virtue signaling with feminist ideals and complete mishandling of how sexism propagated through Soviet society. Like some of the careers may have been on par (women working, but getting sidelined or doomed jobs). But I side eye Valery's convenient military ex-wife and the Pulley's handling of her own characters. The women could only be badasses, but most were side characters and the two closest to the MLM romance mains had to die. One so Valery could have Shenkov, and one so Shenkov could have Valery. What a shitty trope and what shitty handling. Ah yes, feminism with the throwaway train car full of assaulted, dead women that doesnt actually seem to have any semblance of an impact on Valery other than being a plot device when it's time for a heart to heart.

While I'm at it: Resovskaya got done so dirty. She's right. None of that shit could've logically been a real concern. What would have been a concern is the sheer amount of contamination nobody would do anything about AND the lakes that the Mayak plant started to dump waste into instead of the underground tanks. Like both Lake Karachay and Lake Kyzyltash were horrifically polluted. Karachay dried out IN THE 60s and then proceeded to spread radioactive particulates everywhere with the wind. Wow, would you look at that! A real concern that couldve driven Valery's concerns and the plot.

Listen, dear reader. If you've made it this far I am no stranger to dabbling in the writing of shameful things and shitty favs. I will own that shit. Call it tasteless and offensive. That's alright; I will call garbage what it is. The line that I still refuse to cross, though, is real-people-fic'ing it like Pulley did. Because that is somehow worse than all of the above combined. Shoutout to putting your OC in the position to work with one Josef Mengele as another casual throwaway. The dude is hinted at through biological experimentation and then introduced with a "Hey, Jo!" throwaway like a gag. For all my literary sins, at least I have never done that.

Honestly this brings me to my last point on the characterization. I'm running out of juice so I HOPE this rant worked. Like. It feels like everybody is flat and woobified.

Valery starts as a traumatized man with a very heavy scoop of YA protag mixed in. But none of that and none of his characterization ever felt like a lead in to the successive kicks in the pants delivered by the events in his backstory that end up reduced to plot devices. Don't worry! Whatever PTSD he probably has manifests by being Unable to Relate to Others (like some quirky neurodivergent icon), being unable to be on the quiet, and having outbursts timed perfectly to the plot. Also has next to no real romantic development with Shenkov. Every awful thing he learns about this man who murders people left and right and also has a whole ass family is just. Excused. Justified away. And then they settle together in Britain at the end like nothing happens. (The only thing I will excuse is British intelligence involvement as a nod to Mitrokhin, but coming from a Brit it still reeks of savior complex shit).

Sure, I shouldn't expect any shade of performative mental illness from a character in a book. But you shouldn't be surprised to hear it makes him flat. He's not very haunted by himself or any of his consecutive decisions and as a result isn't very compelling. All his character flaws wash out to hum being a weak, woobified loser.

Same for Shenkov. He only kills people because he HAS to and if it weren't him, it would be worse. He's a good arm conducting state suppression of the people! This is all sarcasm. He's arguable the most woobified and hardest to believe. You're telling me a convicted man is put at a top secret installation? You're telling me that Valery casually forgives this man shooting a potential new friend he was hopeful about and might have had a crush on? And you're telling me Shenkov in turn looks at Valery and just wipes his sins away with a bit of windex like "oh you couldn't help working with Mengele! You were just a kid!" Maybe my tolerance is low because of the fact Shenkov is on his second affair with Valery and leaves his wife at home with the kids for most of the week while she works full time (to her credit: this feels like accurate Soviet sexism depicted by Pulley).

All of that leaves neither of the main characters likeable. Combine that with giving the antagonist the only complex, consistent characterization and killing off Shenkov's wife, and you've got a hard no from me.

Overall for all the reasons I've listed above, the book left and continues to leave a bad taste in my mouth. Would not recommend.