“...The story “Switching” is no less interesting. In fact, it is written in a genre that is widespread in the West, but very poorly represented in our literature - in the genre of a spy “almost fantastic” action film. It includes almost all of Fleming's books about James Bond, and it includes the super popular novels of Tom Clancy and, partly, Frederick Forsythe. The attempts of our authors to play on this field ended, alas, not very effectively: sometimes due to the literary helplessness of the authors, sometimes due to too serious an attitude towards their hero - who tars the Belomor without ceasing, and dives a hundred meters with scuba gear; he can cut a bazooka out of birch with a penknife, and hack a computer in the Pentagon in half a minute... The hero of “Switching,” even though he has all the secondary signs of a superman, is saved from the fate of such characters by the author’s irony. James Bond is supposed to land on a sun lounger next to a charming blonde, gliding on a raincoat and holding a glass of vodka martini (shaken, not stirred!) Huck from “Commutation” is allowed to fly to Ethiopia in a gondola landing gear and land on the canopy of someone else’s parachute. To paraphrase the author, “such characters will be useful to our literature in any quantity!” Sergei Lukyanenko