I obviously liked this book quite a bit more that the other raters so far. I’ve always been a fan of the Brothers Strugatsky, and this book offers all the things I like about their writing in spades. Noon: 22nd Century gives us plenty of the sense of wonder which permeates most great science fiction, but is also at times funny, and at other times nerve wracking, It even provides just a bit of understated romance.

This is a book in which technology has profoundly changed life in a way that feels natural. It’s also a book with great characters, people that are sympathetic, realistic, rational and yet irrational in a way that few authors really get right. These are people who think about and care about the big issues, while attacking the mundane challenges of every day life.

Noon: 22nd Century has the feel of a fix up novel, meaning that a bunch of short stories, some of which may have been previously published separately, have been pulled together with some added connecting sections. Wikipedia says that the 1961 version included only 10 stories, the 1962 version was expanded to 16, and the third and final 1967 version was expanded to 20. It appears that only this final version has been translated into English.

Given that, it’s not surprising that the book is not a single narrative, but rather a series of loosely connected episodes, some extended and some quite short. These episodes follow a pair of near future cosmonauts who head out into space, and then return to a much changed future earth under mysterious circumstances, and build relationships with people of this future Earth.

There is nothing blatantly propagandistic about this book, but it does envision a future world in which principals of Soviet communism govern economic resource allocation. If you're one of those people that think Capitalism is holy, and that anyone doubting its inherent holiness is an agent of Satan, you should probably stick to other things.

As Theodore Sturgeon points out in his forward, it is particularly amazing to consider that this was written shortly after sputnik. I see in it much that hints of some of the great work that would follow from Stanislaw Lem. ( )