Monday Begins on Saturday

This is another book from the Russian writing sci-fi workshop of brothers Strugatsky. It can be labeled as a fantasy book but I would describe it as an absurd or comedy sci-fi. It has many comedian and interesting characters. Sasha, a young programmer meets on his vacation two strangers and is offered a programming job in highly classified "Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry" located in some fictional Russian town. This science institute is inhabited by various scientists and you may start guessing correctly that not the ordinary ones. The front desk person is vampire Alfred, the head of the department of prediction is Merlin, and many more. You will find out that the Sorcery and Wizardry computer programming is very similar to the regular one except the programming syntax is different and the computers can get easily upset and sometimes even violent and can dismember the bad programmer. All employees are supposed to work hard willingly and if they don’t the hair start growing from their ears. There are also many funny unanimated characters, as for example Sasha describes in his words “two spider-like mechanisms of smaller size suddenly jumped out of an alley. Before I could begin to react one of them quickly shined my shoe and the other washed and pressed my handkerchief.” Everybody can create his or her doubles to do some simple work like doing the laundry or shopping (I would like that) but they can mess things up since they are not very intelligent. This book is a satire on the Russian bureaucracy and use a lot of Russian classic fairy-tale characters and it is fun to read.