Legend of a Great Warrior

Legend of a Great Warrior (and other cyber-slavic abnormal stories)

This is a collection of five stories set in futures, pasts, and parallel presents that nobody predicted and nobody asked for. A Neo-Uskok company rides across a radioactive plain with an alien who has too many shoulders and a comrade who has been turned into a brick by an unspecified mutation and keeps talking about walls. A trio of medieval knights travels to the third millennium to exorcise a countess haunted by the spirit of a washbasin, who turns out to have a point. A group of determined adventurers boards a hijacked plane headed for Bosnian pyramids that don't exist, guided by interdimensional beings of questionable reliability. And an alien delegation arrives on Earth in well-tailored suits, kisses world leaders in the Russian diplomatic tradition, and sells humanity wedge-shaped artifacts whose main application turns out to be stabilising wobbly furniture, though they do sing along if you put on music.

The Middle Ages, the third millennium, and the post-apocalyptic Slavic steppe keep running into each other and getting on surprisingly well. There are druids grilling sausages, a pangalactic humor festival that nearly ends in a diplomatic incident, a philosopher who used to hunt alien predators for a living, and a legendary warrior who has been reincarnated in a dozen bodies and is identifiable by a birthmark in the shape of cabbage rolls.

Heroic, absurd, and funnier than it has any right to be.