Now he is able to write books just for the pleasure and convenience of having outlets other than bookstores and the Internet, his stores in several countries around the world. After all, the book The Ninth Tentacle of an Octopus is also sold in Czech drugstores.
As a citizen, Rossmann is dealing with global warming and thinking about how to prevent it. His novel is about saving the world. In the sci-fi journey from 2018 to 2100, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and the President of America realized that the system needed to change. They form coalitions to protect the country and assert their power by force.
But what about this framework? The story of the Octopus Ninth Arm is actually not very interesting, less exciting, not to mention the tension. What’s more, at the time Rossmann wrote it, he must not have known, perhaps even though he claimed to have friendly relations with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, what the Russian president would become. Reading today about how these aggressors saved the world is really bad science fiction.
Plot lines and main characters abound in this book, some appearing and disappearing without leaving a visible trace. It does not allow the reader to comfortably enter the story, every effort is made not to get lost in it. Frequent changes of place and time, on the other hand, shape the character of the book. Especially the passages that describe newspaper articles at least bring a bit of a refreshing contribution to the boring story. But that’s not enough.
Being active in climate protection is certainly commendable. However, writing a bloodless novel about it was completely pointless.
| Dirk Rossmann: Octopus’s Ninth Tentacle |
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| Kalibr, translated by Tomáš Kurk, 302 pages. |
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