The Ninth Planet

«The Ninth Planet» — a science fiction novel about a man whose ordinary life suddenly cracks due to an overly vivid foreign memory. At the center of the story is a mechanic nicknamed Crunch: he does not consider himself a hero, but images of another reality emerge in his mind — a base in another world, two moons, daily battles with aggressive creatures, and a love that cannot be dismissed as a random dream. Igor Tkachenko places the hero in a situation where the very foundation of identity is called into question: his own past, the loyalty of friends, and the right to trust himself. Here, not only the fantastic details are important, but also the inner tension of a person who realizes that the familiar biography may turn out to be someone else's version of his life.

The hero tries to figure out why his memories differ from what his comrades remember. They insist that there was no other world, and that military service took place in an ordinary distant garrison. The more persistently he returns to the fragments of the past, the clearer it becomes: it is not about random visions or fatigue. He will have to search for traces of erased memory, test his friends, reconstruct the picture of events, and decide whether he is ready to go to the end for the sake of truth and the woman he remembers despite all explanations.