Recommendations from our site
“It starts out in a Moscow apartment, and the hapless protagonists are a handful of Soviet academics. If you’re an academic, you immediately start to relate to this story. It’s an astrophysicist, a biologist, a specialist in Japanese literature, and a mathematician. They live very ordinary late-Soviet-era lives: they work in fairly well-funded state institutes, but live modestly in cramped Moscow apartments. They’re brilliant, and mostly extremely focused…It’s the height of the summer. It’s hot. All the wives and kids have been packed off to the cooler countryside, and our protagonists, unbeknownst to each other, are all on the verge of spectacular breakthroughs in their respective projects. And then suddenly, just as each is about to figure out a paradigm-shifting innovation in their field, they’re besieged by unexpected distractions and interruptions…It’s a slim little novella. It’s very charming and humorous, but it’s also ominous and thought-provoking.” Read more...
The Best Eastern European Sci Fi
Yvonne Howell, Literary Scholar
