“No one informs on the informer,” Jakub Procházka’s father smugly informs him. Jakub’s father is what’s commonly referred to as a secret policeman (although they actually weren’t that secret in Czechoslovakia), but despite rounding up citizens who aren’t big on communism, he nevertheless has a clandestine fascination in Elvis Presley. You only have to read a few lines of Jaroslav’s Kalfar’s debut novel to realise that you are undoubtedly in the land of the satirist Jaroslav Hašek and film‑maker Jiří Menzel.
Jakub is the Bohemian spaceman of the title: in 2018 a proud Czech Republic fires him off from a launchpad in a potato field to investigate a mysterious cloud of cosmic dust that has appeared between Venus and Earth. There really was a Czech spaceman, Vladimír Remek, who in 1978 became a cosmonaut courtesy of the Russians, and Kalfar makes a joke or two at the expense of Moscow’s space programme.
It's as if an episode of Star Trek has crashed into Milan Kundera’s The Joke
Related: 2018, a space odyssey: Jaroslav Kalfař's strange debut is out of this world
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