"No Place for People" by Sergey Lukyanenko and Nick Perumov, summary

"No Place for Humans" is a 2020 novel, the second collaboration between Sergey Lukyanenko and Nik Perumov and a direct sequel to their cult classic "No Time for Dragons" (1997). The action takes place almost a quarter of a century after the events of the first novel: the Middle World — the space between the Upside Down (our human world) and the World of the Innate — lives in relative peace under the rule of Victor, a former Moscow doctor turned Dragon Ruler. But the former balance is beginning to crack.

The book was created during the pandemic and initially published on the Litmarket platform as an interactive novel: readers voted weekly on the plot’s development, resulting in twenty different endings online. In the 2021 paperback edition, the authors retained only one version of the ending.

Notty and Loy Iver’s lesson

The novel opens with Notty, the young daughter of Viktor the Dragon and Tel the Unicorn. After a falling out with her parents, she runs away to a fair in the coastal village near Zámok nad Mírom. At dawn, after an evening of dancing with a local boy, Tran, who asks her for a kiss, Notty is left alone on a cliff overlooking the sea — until Loy Iver, the leader of the Cat clan, emerges from the forest thicket.

Loy gives Notty a harsh lesson: she fakes her own death by throwing herself off a cliff — almost exactly as Notty had suggested Tran himself do just a moment earlier. Notty rushes to save the body, trying to infuse healing power into the illusion and nearly creating a cadaver. Glutton, an embodiment of Chaos from the Innate World who is allowed to enter the Middle World one day out of seven, appears and restrains her. When the living Loy emerges from behind her, she formulates the conclusion bluntly: Notty knows how to pity her loved ones, but is indifferent to strangers, and doesn’t understand the difference between humans and magical creatures. Glutton, however, tells Loy that they need to talk: unpleasant things are happening in all worlds at once.

Victor in Moscow

Victor visits the Upside Down several times a year. On this visit, he’s met by a worried grandmother, Vera, the last survivor of the ancient line of Dragon Lords, who lives in the village of Perevitsky Torzhok. She can’t explain what she senses, but she warns: something has happened, hidden from the most sensitive — even the Innate would sense it, but she can’t sense this.

In Victor’s Moscow apartment, four uninvited guests greet him: elemental mages calling themselves the "Red Berets" — Georgiy (fire), Daria (air), Alexey (water), and Svyatozar Lyubimovich (earth). They’ve been tracking Victor for four years, knowing he knows the way into the world of magic. The conversation begins aggressively — Svyatozar pins Victor to the floor with an invisible "press" — but then turns to negotiation. Victor decides to help: elemental mages have no place in the Upside Down; their power is weak and distorts reality. In Serebryany Bor, he leads the four through the passage to the Middle World, shows them the way to the nearest village, and says goodbye. The mages, however, try to force him to act as their guide — a confrontation that nearly ends in open combat.

Eric from Vladivostok

The story of Eric, a withdrawn fifteen-year-old from Vladivostok, unfolds in parallel. One evening, he accidentally overhears a conversation between his adoptive parents and discovers he is not related to them by blood. That night, a vague call — the same one that previously drove him to commit inexplicable acts — pulls him away from home. Without farewells or notes, he reaches the shore of Amur Bay and leaps off a cliff into the dark water. Through the Gray Boundaries — the dangerous borderlands between worlds — he finds himself in the Middle World.

There, Eric encounters Notty, who has lost his memory. Making their way together through the far east of Mid-World, they encounter the brothers Gunnar and Herley — half-formed creatures of Chaos in human form. When they attack, Notty tries to fight back with wind magic, but falls to his knees from the strain. Then Eric reaches for something within himself — and extinguishes the other’s magic: the brothers crumble into shapeless heaps. His gift is the destruction of magic, the cancellation of other people’s spells.

Vsevolod and initiation

Following close behind Eric is Vsevolod — Seva, Viktor’s son, who wields advanced Earth magic, atypical for a descendant of the Dragon. Seva knows: Eric’s gift is the gift of a Dragon Slayer, a protective antipode, needed in case a ruler loses his sense of proportion. Seva is ready to stop the stranger to protect his father, but at the shore of a forest lake, he discovers that the four heads of the Elemental Clans — the retired Rhetor, Thorn, Andrzej, and Lei — have already surrounded Eric. They have come not to kill him, but to initiate him: the ritual is meant to transform his uncontrollable, destructive gift into a conscious force. All four Elements are balanced at that moment — this cannot be a coincidence. Seva freezes behind the trees, not interfering.

The Other Side and Loy Iver

Victor and Tel find themselves in a strange version of the Upside Down: a world with Soviet slogans on faded red cloth and a conductor on bus route 53 to Lukhovitsy — but without any precise time references. The world resembles the USSR of the 1960s and 1970s, but lacks dates and appears like a frozen cast. Victor and Tel try to figure out where and when they ended up.

Meanwhile, Loy Iver herself crosses into the Upside Down — and discovers that the world is resisting her, gently pushing her back, as if trying to push out a originally magical being.

A threat without a name

The thread running through the novel is a sense of impending, yet unformed, danger. Something is upsetting the balance in three worlds at once. The Gray Reaches — the borderlands where the Dragon’s power is weak — are restless. The Innates are stirring. Elemental mages have appeared in the Upside Down in unprecedented numbers. And the Dragon’s own daughter wanders the Middle World, lost in thought, in the company of a young man capable of destroying what her father spent over twenty years building — none of whom is an enemy or an ally, but simply a boy who, in one night, broke anchor and abandoned himself to the mercy of the waves.