Moscow 2042

The narrator here, a Russian writer in exile in Germany, gets the chance to travel fast-forward in a time machine and return to Mother Russia to see what's happened there come year 2042. There are risks (not being able to come back), but he's game. He's just about to make the journey when he's summoned to Canada by his old colleague, Sim Simych Karnavalov - who is living in Tolstoyan isolation and preparing by dint of moral purity to make his return to Russia on a white steed as Tsar: Of course it's Solzhenitsyn, and nowhere else in this amiably loopy but not very effective satire is the dart so sharp, Voinovich's skewering of the pretensions, megalomania, and guru-ism of Sim Simych being piquantly nasty. Which by contrast makes the section where the writer does finally travel forward to Russia seem disappointing. There is a Gorbachev-slicky in charge of Moscowrep (Moscow, its own republic, is the only place where Communism still is given a shot; all the rest of the country has basically been written off) who is termed the Genialissimo; much to-do is made about Primary and Secondary levels (the hoarding of human waste, semen, and garbage - everything back to the recycler) and writing by committee. All amusing enough - but trenchant, no. That the Soviet Union merely becomes more ingenious in its comic desperation (and ready for a frozen-alive Sim Simych to actually return and be crowned) is Voinovich's point - but apart from the intramural mudslinging, there's not much here to more than occasionally smile over. (Kirkus Reviews)