Unusual book by one of my favourite writers. It's one of his earliest pieces of fiction, and it's obvious that it wasn't original planned as fiction at all. It's a sort of history of Soviet economic planning and policy, from the perspective of several different characters and across different time periods. Underlying it is the idea, now sort of preposterous, that the orderliness of a planned economy would allow the USSR to not only catch up with but then far outstrip the prosperity enjoyed in the capitalist west. The book works by showing us all the cynical grifters and dull bureaucrats who made the system work, but also the true believers who thought that with proper science (especially cybernetics) the planned economy really could deliver. One of these is Khrushchev himself, both in his period of power and after his fall; but there are lots of other characters, some of them real people and others composites of real people.
The first proper book that I've read on my new Kobo device, and slightly more enjoyable than the ailing Kindle, but not as pleasurable as a real paper book.
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