About the book: 1997 / The story is formally a continuation of one of the best works by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, “A Billion Years Before the End of the World.” The action of the story takes place in our days, in our city, only the Strugatsky heroes have aged ten years, and have changed by a hundred years; Such were these ten years in Russia. At the center of the plot is an attempt to answer the question that has haunted Christian, and not only Christian, culture for many thousands of years: why is the righteous unhappy and the unrighteous happy? A piercingly lyrical and at the same time deeply philosophical story of a man who has spent his entire life on the verge of a quarrel with the Universe, and yet remains a man and a thinker who retains the ability to love, cherish and learn. The concept of God the Universe, developed by the author specifically for this story, as far as one can judge, has no analogues or predecessors either in world science fiction or in world theology.