In the 1950s, a retired man in New York City speculates on a variety of cases of odd temporal occurrences such as the woman who realized that the old dog who persistently followed her in 1947 was actually the puppy she adopted several years later. And then there was the now famous case of Rudolph Fentz who seemingly popped into Times Square on an evening in the 1950s, apparently straight from 1876.

Archeologist Wayne Banford ignores the sanskrit warning to leave the camera where he found it in a cave with an idol.

Petty thieves Chet and Paula Diedrich are frustrated, angry, and in a bickering mood when they find nothing but cheap junk in the 400-lbs. of stuff they lifted from a curios store in the middle of the night, . . . until that boxy looking camera with the indecipherable label—dix à la propriétaire—produces a photo of the immediate future.

Based on a review at the Modern Novel website, part of this story involves the devil showing photographs of the future to a man named Vanoski (an obscure author from the 1930s). So, we’ve got photos-from-the-future, but no actual time travel. However, there is time travel in another story (“Fotografiya Pushkin (1799–2099)”) from the Teacher of Symmetry Cycle. And just to pile satire on top of satire, the 16 stories in the cycle were purportedly written by an obscure Englishman named A. Tired-Boffin, and Bitov was merely the humble messenger who provided translations of these lost gems into Russian.

Also, according to Fantlab[/b] and Labirint, this is the central story of Bitov’s Teacher of Symmetry Cycle, which consists of 16 of avant-garde stories by an unknown English author, A. Tired-Boffin (1859–1937). Bitov purportedly found and translated some of these stories to Russian.

Three friends stumble across a camera that produces pictures from 24 hours in the future. That no-good Jasper thinks to use it to make a fortune with his bookie, while painter Finn is happy to see a painting that he’s going to paint, resulting in a nice example of the artist paradox. And Callie has her own agenda going on. From there, the plot turns into a gory thriller where whatever the photos show, the three friends must make happen or they will die as Mr. B. did, all while the bookie’s henchmen threaten them all.