If novels were events, "The Radiant Future" would be a circus. Despite its title, it is not science fiction, nor is it a romance about a collective farm: it is a book about the adventures of the mind…. "The aim of the book," Zinoviev writes about a book within this book, "is to give an objective description of communism as it really is from the point of view of its deepest underlying laws, its tendencies and its future prospects." The comment is appropriate to the book at hand.

"The Radiant Future," written in the form of dialogues and intellectual confessions and anecdotes by an unnamed narrator, is directed against the intelligentsia which defends an ideology that prevents people, capable of being human, from becoming intelligently human. Zinoviev's main professional interests are in nonclassical logic and its application to the analysis of the language of science. His literary ambition...