Description

In this book the author talks about society where people are less and less interested in they actual job in the real world, more and more preferring various leisure activities. The authors present these activities as ugly, harmful and dangerous (like dangerous wandering in abandoned tunnels or vampire orgies). The culmination of this direction seems the invention of "slug", a kind of drug (more exactly, exposure to specific radiation) that fully brings the using person from the boring reality into some far more attractive virtual world. "Slug" is deadly dangerous and there is no simple escape from it because it is easy to get everything needed to arrange it from the surrounding "innocent" goods. It is possible to interpret the book as criticism of the "Leisure civilization" that started to emerge during Brezhnev stagnation, with people more and more losing motivation to they direct work. Likely the authors also suspected that this effect would also prevent building communistic society on its own.

The literal English translation of the original Russian title is "Predatory Things of Our Times".