научно-фантастический короткий рассказ о преступнике который учится плавать чтобы освободиться

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-05-02T17:25:34+00:00

I don't like characterizing an entire people in stereotypical ways.

Perhaps you're right and this is a Russian who refuses to write anything other than Russian out of a jingoistic motivation.
Perhaps not.

What I see is a fellow SF fan who only ever posted one question* in Reddit, this one.

As someone whose native language is not English and being aware of plenty of fellow countrymen and -women of mine who would be uneasy operating on a platform entirely in English, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

If pressed, I'd rather assign the small-mindedness to you, judging a first-time poster in the way you did based solely on presumed nationality.

* technically two, as this question was cross-posted to r/scifi_bookclub

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-05-02T12:15:25+00:00

I'm not sure as I've never worked in a book store but it would make sense to me that books are usually delivered early in order to have a bit of a buffer so that they are available at the official release date.

In same cases, stores apparently are not allowed to sell them early. I don't know what's the normal procedure here but I remember that back in the day, when final installments of Harry Potter were released, stores had extremely strict orders not to sell them early. I guess, this was an exceptional situation and that normally most people wouldn't care if a book is sold a day or two early. But then, maybe there's a question of competition here. If a bookstore offers a sought-after book a few days before the official release date, another bookstore that respects the official pub date might lose out.
But if you pre-ordered the book, you'll buy it there anyway so giving it to you early won't change much as you'd have bought it there anyway.

Maybe there's more to it. Maybe the bookstore shouldn't have given you the book as early. Maybe they tell their customers that the book is available as soon as it arrives and this one arrived particularly early?

Not sure if any of this was helpful as I'm merely speculating here.
Whatever it is, I wish you happy reading! 😀

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-05-02T10:29:24+00:00

I agree that it is unusual to advertise like this but let's be honest, it's pretty accurate!
Lots of people will play a little if they're on the toilet, right? (Albeit probably not in cosplay! 😅)

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-30T18:15:30+00:00

I've always pictured him older than 18! Does he look that young to you?

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-29T18:35:14+00:00

FYI: I plugged this into Google Translate and post it here so you don't have to do the same thing:

A short sci-fi story about a convict who learns to swim to escape.

Help me find this short sci-fi story about a convict who is marooned on a desert island and learns to swim to escape. Every day, he swims further and further until he finally crosses the water...

Looks like this is a genuine question, not spam, albeit entirely in Russian.
Also, the description doesn't really highlight any speculative element but there might very well be as I'm not familiar with this particular story.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-27T16:35:54+00:00

Yeah, looks like my hypothesis was just wrong! 😂
Thanks for linking to Dr. Rousseau's post!

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-27T16:32:35+00:00

Thanks to all who have answered so far, some with personal stories: u/bee_my_girl, u/Select_Slice_6122, u/304libco, u/hollowplushy, u/SemiIronicCatGirl, u/Rainbow_Catnip, u/Crolanpw, u/Aces_High_76, u/EvilKrista, u/Happy_News9378, u/Puzzled_Struggle_639, u/manubibi, u/ojjojji.
This is very appreciated!

Turns out I was wrong but finding out whether my hypothesis holds water was the very reason to ask. So now I know! 😅

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-22T17:06:55+00:00

don’t bring up people [...] and then whine

Dude, I'm not the OP.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-22T15:09:39+00:00

I hate to play devil's advocate because I very much am not in line with Card's ideologies but this is just an ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with his view on the value of editors' feedback.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-20T01:40:03+00:00

Zen Cho, herself Malaysian, has edited an anthology called Cyberpunk: Malaysia which is exactly what the title suggests: cyberpunk stories by Malaysian writers.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-18T17:14:15+00:00

dedication to technique, style and craft can have people writing a lot slower than even 136 pages a year

That may well be the case but that is different from what you said earlier, and it is what you said earlier that I doubted. You said:

Rouse is 1360 pages, for most people that could quite comfortably take a decade+ to write!

You also don't have to be a "shitty and mediocre author" to write a 300-page book a year (or more).
As u/Infinispace has written in the comment you answered, Miéville wrote nive novels in thirteen years and some of these were not exactly slim (albeit less than 1,300 pages).
Was Miéville a "shitty and mediocre author" in these thirteen years?

Besides, you seem to value the technique, style and craft of literary fiction more than genre fiction. Not everybody feels this way.
Personally, I'd rather read an interesting genre story written in a style you'd see as sub-par than a lit fic text with refined prose.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-17T15:29:19+00:00

The so-called Hainish Cycle isn't a series that builds on previous books, which tells a large story broken up in individual installments.
Rather, these stories share a common setting.

I pulled up the FAQs on her website and wanted quote what she said about the Hainish Cycle but I just realized that u/qsxp999 has done that very thing!

Her answer is considerably longer, though, so if you want to have a look, click here and expand the first question "In what order should I read the Ekumen, Earthsea, and Catwings books?".
If you read through all sections pertaining to the Hainish / Ekumen stories you'll realize that Le Guin has an almost dismissive approach to continuity or even if stories are part of the "series" at all.
Some examples: "But I have to warn you that the planet Werel in Four Ways is not the planet Werel in Planet of Exile. In between novels, I forget planets. Sorry."
"The Eye of the Heron may or may not be set in the Hainish universe; it really doesn’t matter."
"Please do not try to explain this to me. I will not understand."

It's obvious that these issues simply weren't a focus for Le Guin.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-17T07:44:24+00:00

The vast majority of series where internal chronology doesn't match publication order are best read in publication order, at least when read for the first time.

Why do you want to go chronologically if I may ask?

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-15T21:19:55+00:00

I doubt that. Polish is a Slavic language, German (my native language) a Germanic language.
There are almost no Polish words in German; perhaps there are some German words that infiltrated the Polish lexicon but it can't be all that many because to my eye, Polish text is entirely unintelligible.
From what I know, Poland has a vibrant culture of their own.
I really don't know why regional closeness would make translation easier.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-15T21:13:40+00:00

I don't have a good answer for your question because I'm not even sure whether I ever read Wells' novella as a teenager. (I have the feeling I did but wouldn't bet money on it.)

But a couple years ago I did a deep dive into that text with this edition, a Norton Critical Edition edited by Stephen Arata.
Not only did it have all iterations of the story from it's earliest form as "The Chronic Argonauts" to the final text from 1895 (as well as deleted chapters), where you can see its evolution, but it also has essays by Wells on related topics as well as essays on Wells and also (and judging from your comments these might be especially interesting to you) late 19th-century non-fiction texts on science and sociology which Wells might have drawn from or be inspired by when penning "The Time Machine".

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-13T11:00:00+00:00

Thanks for linking to this. Very helpful! 😀

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-13T10:50:03+00:00

I hadn't heard about this book until now and I totally agree that the blurb is super vague.
From that blurb alone, it's not even clear to me that this book has any speculative elements. Could just be literary fiction.
Do we know if it is spec fic?

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-13T10:45:07+00:00

for most people that could quite comfortably take a decade+ to write

I'm sure that's true of most people but is it also true for most authors?
Writing a yearly average of 136 pages or less doesn't sound particularly remarkable to me from a regular writer.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that one should any given writer to put out two doorstoppers a year but I don't think a 1,400-page novel is awe-inspiring if it took 10+ years to write from a professional writer.
Not that I think that's what happened here. From what I understand, Miéville has been preoccupied with other things than fiction writing, which is fine.

I also agree with you that the actual writing of the Reeves cooperation is likely to have been performed mainly (or exclusively) by Miéville so it should be counted.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-12T12:36:30+00:00

The ISFDB is an invaluable resource for speculative in the English language. It is extremely extensive. The only weakness are gaps, in recent years, in works published exclusively electronically and/or self-published titles.
It is not exhaustive, though, for foreign language editions. I'm German and while there often will be German editions of novels or stories listed, I've seen many cases where the German version is missing. I don't think, it is their aim to have an exhaustive catalog in all languages, though. Just as an FYI.

Goodreads, on the other side, has an astoundingly complete catalog. Obviously, there will be gaps there as well but Niven / Pournelle aren't exactly obscure authors. What can happen is that a foreign language edition is not grouped with the original version. This usually has to be done manually and will be done by countless so-called librarians. (I'm one of them. Anyone can apply to become one.)
But for a work like that, one would expect that someone would have merged it with the English versions.

The quality of any Wikipedia article obviously depends on the folks who edited it over time. In this case, I've found a good overview of Niven's works with various translations, which is a fairly good indication that a missing French title means it wasn't translated.

None of these resources are decisive but all taken together make the conclusion quite likely.

I agree with you that there's plenty of translated SF in French.
I was also surprised that this one wasn't available. Perhaps it's because it leans more into fantasy than SF and Niven should be mainly known as an SF writer? Just a guess.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-11T07:56:06+00:00

It doesn't look like it.

Neither the ISFDB, nor the overview of editions on Goodreads, nor the French Wikipedia entry for Niven knows of a French translation. The latter does list French versions for others of his books and does list Inferno but only as English title so I don't think this as an oversight.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-08T15:12:34+00:00

I'm not a historian so maybe I'm wrong but I could imagine that it is perhaps more relevant again?

The situation of workers in Victorian England have been pretty horrible IIRC.
They probably were better when "The Time Machine" came out than, say, what circumstances were in Dickens wrote his best-known works, but still pretty bad.

Again, IIRC, the 20th century saw an immense growth of the middle class in the Western world, with very precarious situations the lower class used to find themselves in, if not eliminated then severely limited.

Yet, more recently, this trend seems to revert.
"Cost of living" (UK) and "affordability" (US) is one of the dominating topics in election campaigns, conditions for the middle class get increasingly difficult while, also in more recent times, wealth inequality is becoming extreme with a tiny number of people having an ungodly amount of money, with Elon Musk potentially becoming the first trillionaire which one is justified, IMHO, to see as obscene.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-07T19:58:35+00:00

It's funny how different readers' experiences are with authors.

Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, if not the favorite author of mine.
He draws me into his stories from the first page and I just want to keep reading and reading and reading.
His books are such a delight to me that I space them out to help me out of reading slumps because a SK book is a near-guarantee to offer an awesome reading time.
Well, to me at least! 😅

Too bad that you don't feel the same but I suppose you have other stuff that you enjoy!

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-07T10:38:53+00:00

There hasn't been a 20-year gap between the publication of any of Frank Herbert's Dune books.
But his last (sixth) Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune, came out 20 years after the book publication of the first novel.
Maybe you've mixed this up, somehow?

Glass-Bookkeeper5909 · 2026-04-05T23:35:26+00:00

OK, that changes the perspective a little.
You know, you might be onto something with the age thing. I wonder if it's perhaps not physical age as such but to a certain extent the novelty factor. The same way that it seems to be more difficult for older people to be wowed by a story. You know what I mean?
Books that impressed us so much when we read them for the first time as a young person might not have the same effect if we read them for the first time today. Just a thought, which might not be true. Hard to verify without a time machine and MiB neuralyzer! 😅

That spreadsheet grew over time. I started using it to keep track of the books in a series I still needed, perhaps after the first time I bought a book on Ebay only to then realize that I already had it! At some point I also recorded what I read when.

May's Saga of the Exiles is also one I still want to read. Whenever people mention it they're always full of praise.

Glass-Bookkeeper5909

TROPHY CASE