The Octopus Era

The Octopus Era (Russian title: Время спрута) is a detective novel by the Russian lawyer and human rights activist Anatoly Kucherena. The author served as Edward Snowden's attorney during his stay in Russia, and the book builds its fiction on the PRISM scandal and Snowden's exile. The protagonist, "Cold" (a transliteration of the English word, modeled on Snowden), works for an American intelligence agency. On the job he gradually discovers that his superiors are advancing a mass surveillance program called "PRISM." The program is meant for counterterrorism, yet it can just as easily obtain the communications and private information of ordinary citizens and even foreign leaders. Cold concludes that it has crossed the line of counterterrorism and amounts to a violation of citizens' privacy. After weighing the matter repeatedly, he decides to make these secrets public. The novel unfolds along two narrative threads: one follows Cold as, anxiously awaiting a decision on his asylum application, he retraces the sequence of events that led to his decision to expose the program; the other portrays his circumstances, fears, and psychological turmoil before and after the exposure, laying bare layer by layer the inner journey of a man who moves from "patriot" to "traitor." Through a suspenseful narrative the work explores the ethical dilemma between privacy and national security, using the form of the detective novel as a metaphor for the surveillance society that may emerge in the information age; critics have often read it as a parable with Orwellian dystopian overtones. The Chinese edition was translated by Xu Xianyu and revised by the Russian literature scholar Liu Wenfei.