Ilya Iosifovich Varshavsky is a classic of Soviet science fiction, a master of the short form. His stories amaze with their sharp plots, inventiveness, and literary skill. Stanislav Lem said about I. Varshavsky’s prose that all Western science fiction fit into it. The fiction of I. Varshavsky - humorous, satirical, parody, psychological - will certainly be of interest to the modern reader who is not yet familiar with the work of this wonderful writer. Connoisseurs and lovers of the works of I. Varshavsky will find in the proposed collection several stories that were not published during the writer’s lifetime and first saw the light only in 2009–10 in the Internet magazine “Milky Way.”