The novel by M. Yemtsev and E. Parnov “The Black Box of Ceres” (“Dirac Sea”) collected most of the elements of a Soviet science fiction novel about the near future characteristic of the sixties. It contains a fantastic invention, a detective story, sketches from the life of a Soviet research institute, and popular science digressions (one of the titles of the novel is “Dirac Sea” - a concept taken from quantum electrodynamics), and the action is retrospectively transferred from the USSR in the sixties to Third Reich during the war. Among the main characters are a disinterested scientist, a careerist scientist, a speculator, a brilliant lone inventor, a German anti-fascist...