New Soviet science fiction /

A baker's dozen of short Soviet sf, mostly tending toward the innocuous. Kirill Bulychev solemnly works an unremarkable idea about a race of empaths; Anatoly Dneprov expends much effort on a slender tale about hubristic scientists creating human beings in the laboratory. The dominant note, however, is archness--as in Vladlen Bakhnov's story of quantified art criticism (""Marinelli's 'Madonna' registered 6500 ahs, while Flower's landscapes registered an average of 3400""), Gennady Gor's yarn of time travel gone mildly haywire, and Vadim Shefner's ""The Friar of Chikola"" (involving extraterrestrial assistance in a visionary's quest for the four-legged chicken). There are a few more incisive contributions, like Ilya Varshavsky's ""Escape"" (slave labor through mass hallucination), Shefner's sweetly ironic ""A Provincial's Wings"" (about the first man to achieve self-powered flight), Mikhail Emtsev and Eremei Parnov's ""The Pale Neptune Equation"" (an uneven but very impressive portrayal of an atomic physicist confronting the coming of Nazism), and Vladimir Savchenko's witty ""Success Algorithm"" (computer prediction of human behavior). Thin collection with a few substantial moments. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.