Example: up until very recently there was — as far as I know — not one single science fiction story which included a device like the wristwatch my wife wears, which delivers the time, day, date, adjusts itself for months of varying lengths, is a stopwatch and elapsed — time recorder, and has a solar panel which gulps down any available light and recharges its battery. The development of these microelectronic devices, now quite common and inexpensive, was simply unthought of by science fiction professionals, and is by no means the only example of technological quantum leaps which season our arrogance. It is beneficial to all concerned when our dignitaries are observed, from time to time, to slip and sit down in mud puddles.)

Mud puddles, or their narrative equivalent, are far from absent in this book, for Savchenko has a delicious sense of humor and a lovely appreciation of the outrageous. Let us posit, for example, that you are a brilliant but not particularly attractive man with little concern for the more gracious amenities, who happens to be loved by a beautiful and forgiving lady. In the course of your work you produce a living, breathing version of yourself who is a physical Adonis and who, further, has a clear recollection of every word, every intimacy, that has ever passed between you and the woman.

And they meet, and she likes him.

How do you feel?

Why?

And then there's Onisimov — poor, devoted, duty — bound Onisimov — a detective in whose veins runs the essence of the Keystone Kop, up against a case with a perfectly rational solution which he is utterly unequipped to solve — not at all because he is unable to understand it, but because he simply cannot believe it.

Then there's the offensive Hilobok, unfortunately (as mentioned above) not quite a parody, but the object of not a few instances of Krivoshein/Savchenko's irrepressible puckishness, and a gatekeeper who is certainly Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern rolled into one, and a fine sprinkling of smiles amid the cascades of heavy ideation.