Pigs, mushrooms and bullets: everything you need to live underground, away from the mutants

Question

I remember reading a series of books, consisting of a total of three books, maybe 3 years ago (in 2014). The series wasn't very old at that point. The titles contained years.

The scenario was basically our current real world a couple of years in the future - just that there had been a nuclear war, forcing the people of the city that the books were set in underground, where they lived in underground stations.

They could plant mushrooms and either eat the mushrooms themselves or feed them to the pigs to later eat the pigs. There wasn't much other food, as nothing could grow underground without any real light and often without any artificial light, too. The main currency were bullets that could be used to buy stuff or to shoot.

Shooting wasn't necessary most of the time. Only for those who were going to the surface in special hazmat suits, trying to recover some materials from the city above. Those people often died very early because of the radiation or because some mutants got them.

There were quite a few underground stations that were connected to one another. Some of them formed factions. For example the innermost ring was a faction itself and there was a Nazi faction and a communist faction.

The first book starts with the main character in one of the outer stations being sent by a mercenary to a certain station with a message because some unknown mutants were attacking the station and it could be a threat to all of them, which would mean the extinction of humanity. The book focused a lot on social aspects and the daily life he would encounter on the different stations. Throughout the book he has to go to the surface into a library where big mutants await him and there are multiple unknown threats, not just mutants, on his way from station to station. Not to mention the different factions.

I've also played a game that was based on the first book. Sadly it focused a lot more on the "Kill mutants!" part so that instead of rare occasions mutants became the norm and you would kill lots of waves of them. Not quite the feeling I got from the book.

The second book was about a girl who met the mercenary from the first book at is travelling with him from station to station. It was not quite as good as the first one, but the second book was also quite interesting.

The third one is the one I didn't finish. It was written from the first characters perspective again. He was thinking about his actions from the first book the whole time. I would love to finish this series and I can't remember why exactly I didn't finish the book. It was just not as fascinating as the first one.

Could you help me remember what the series was called so I can finish the last book?

Answer 1

Metro 2033

This book, by Dmitry Glukhovsky, was published in 2010 in the US. According to Wikipedia:

In 2013, a nuclear war occurred, forcing a large amount of Moscow’s surviving population to relocate to underground metro stations in search of refuge. Eventually, the communities settled in the underground train stations developed into independent states. Soon, factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the “Rangers of the Order”, to the communist “Red Line” faction and the fascist “Fourth Reich”, to the more powerful factions such as “Polis”, which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the “Hanza” regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power. As these groups began to evolve, the Red Line and the Fourth Reich quickly entered a state of war, as both sought to destroy the other. As the war raged, the stations who refused to join either side were either demolished by the factions, merged into the Hanza regime, raided by criminal bandits, or formed their own independent states. Other stations were outright destroyed by animals, mutated by the nuclear fallout. While most of the stations were controlled by the 3 main factions, some stations formed an independent alliances, including the station VDNKh (“Exhibition”). Within that station, the events of Metro 2033 unfold.

Note the Communist and Nazi factions.

As for the pigs and mushrooms:

Artyom accepted a white, enamelled cup, in which some of their homemade station tea was splashing around. Of course, it wasn’t really tea at all, but an infusion of dried mushrooms and other additives. Real tea was a rarity. They rationed it and drank it only at major holidays, and it fetched a price dozens of times higher than the price of the mushroom infusion. Nevertheless, they liked their own station brew and were even proud enough of it to call it ‘tea.’ It’s true that strangers would spit it out at first, since they weren’t used to its taste; but soon they got used to it. And the fame of their tea spread beyond the bounds of their station - even the traders came to get it, one by one, risking life and limb, and soon after their tea made it down the whole metro line - even the Hanseatic League had started to become interested in it and great caravans of the magical infusion rolled towards VDNKh. Cash started to flow. And wherever there was money, there were weapons, there was firewood and there were vitamins. And there was life. Ever since they started making the very same tea at VDNKh, the station had begun to grow strong; people from the nearby stations moved to the station and stretches of track were laid to the station; prosperity had come. They were also very proud of their pigs at VDNKh, and legend had it that it was precisely from this station that the pigs had entered the metro: back at the very beginning of things when certain daredevils had made their way to the ‘pig-breeding pavilion’ at the Exhibition and managed to herd the animals back down to the station.

_{Metro 2033}

And further:

They scrapped over everything with total abandon: over living spaces, over food - over the plantings of albuminous yeast, the crops of mushrooms that didn’t require any sunlight, the chicken coops and pig-farms, where pale subterranean pigs and emaciated chicks were raised on colourless underground mushrooms. They fought, of course, over water - that is, over filters. Barbarians, who didn’t know how to repair filtration systems that had fallen into disuse, and were dying from water that was poisoned by radiation, threw themselves with animal rage upon the bastions of civilized life, at the stations where the dynamo-machines and small home-made hydroelectric stations functioned correctly, where filters were repaired and cleaned regularly, where, tended by the caring female hands, the damp ground was punctuated with the little white caps of champignons, and well-fed pigs grunted in their pens.

_{Metro 2033}

Finally, here are some mutants from the video games.

The sequels were Metro 2034 and Metro 2035, the latter of which was published in English only last year.

Answer 2

Metro 2033

In 2013, a nuclear war occurred, forcing a large amount of Moscow's surviving population to relocate to underground metro stations in search of refuge. Eventually, the communities settled in the underground train stations developed into independent states. Soon, factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the "Rangers of the Order", to the communist "Red Line" faction and the fascist "Fourth Reich", to the more powerful factions such as "Polis", which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the "Hanza" regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power. As these groups began to evolve, the Red Line and the Fourth Reich quickly entered a state of war, as both sought to destroy the other. As the war raged, the stations who refused to join either side were either demolished by the factions, merged into the Hanza regime, raided by criminal bandits, or formed their own independent states. Other stations were outright destroyed by animals, mutated by the nuclear fallout. While most of the stations were controlled by the 3 main factions, some stations formed an independent alliances, including the station VDNKh ("Exhibition"). Within that station, the events of Metro 2033 unfold.

There were two videogames: Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light

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