The theme of Slaves of Spiegel is junk food. There are not many novels about which one can say that; nor many that feature space chickens, a moon filled with Milky Way candy bars, and people wrapped in aluminum foil and then shrunk for easy storage. In Slaves of Spiegel, where the unusual is the norm, one should not expect to discover ordinary characters, and one does not.

This novel, as befits such a surpassingly quirky work, has outsized characters, menacing figures who are the scourges of the cosmos. The Fat Man of Spiegel are pirates, "the feared and hated Fat Men, whose raids have depleted much of the junk food in the universe." Appropriately, they live on a bizarre world of "scorching Spiegelian days and freezing Spiegelian nights": In a far distant corner of the universe, in an unnamed galaxy, in an unimportant...