LAIKA’S GHOST

A quiet, reserved nuclear engineer keeps getting pulled into sticky occupational hazards in Schroeder’s novel.

Gennady Malianov is an unassuming nuclear engineer from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, who navigates a series of rising crises that distract him from the lecture halls and reactor sites he prefers. He finds himself pulled into a shadow network of inspections, near-misses, and silent catastrophes after a violent clash at his university and a random meeting with international investigators. His freelance work (he’s got loose ties to the International Atomic Agency) takes him from abandoned mines to oil fields, and from bureaucratic offices to makeshift launch sites. Gennady is not your typical hero—he avoids the spotlight and distrusts institutions—but his nuclear expertise makes him invaluable to many important people and organizations. As an inspector, he concentrates on hard-to-notice details like patterns of deterioration, minor irregularities, and human mistakes surrounding potent technology. This mysterious double life he lives includes interactions with opportunists, idealists, and extremists of all sorts—all of whom create some edgy conflict in the story. In one chilling moment, the stakes rise when Gennady discovers a dangerous plane that could wreak nuclear havoc on humanity: “It’s a supersonic ramjet that spews radiation and heat and shockwave[s] behind it and never stops.” Unlike minor characters like Jafarov or Lisa Blaine, who operate in murkier, semi-covert roles, Nadine, who’s part of the official inspection world and treats Gennady like a colleague, is not just a replaceable tool. What stands out isn’t so much how things get resolved, but how Gennady slowly comes to see what’s really at stake for himself and others involved in the same work. His modus operandi involves trying to keep to himself and completing his work without fuss, but over time he finds himself in situations where staying neutral just isn’t possible. Underneath his calm surface, there’s a flickering tension, a sense that the potentially dark consequences of the dangerous technologies he works with never really go away.

Although the central character isn’t about big heroic moments, the daily grind of Gennady’s shady techno-underworld is oddly compelling.