"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
A certain woman was very bumptious. Her husband came from a village council one day, and she asked him: “What have you been deciding over there?” “What have we been deciding? why choosing a Golova.” “Whom have you chosen?” “No one as yet.” “Choose me,” says the woman. So as soon...
A bad wife lived on the worst of terms with her husband, and never paid any attention to what he said. If her husband told her to get up early, she would lie in bed three days at a stretch; if he wanted her to...
A Mirror on Virtuality, Scarcity, and Human Dependency Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun (1957) is the second novel in his Robots cycle, following The Caves of Steel and preceding The Robots of Dawn. These books occupy an important place in Asimov’s broader universe, where they form...
Once there was an old man who was such an awful drunkard as passes all description. Well, one day he went to a kabak, intoxicated himself with liquor, and then went staggering home blind drunk. Now his way happened to lie across a river. When...
The Tales of Old Miura (I racconti del vecchio Miura), published in Italy by Lindau, brings together short stories by Kidō Okamoto (1872–1939), a Japanese playwright and novelist best remembered for his contribution to kabuki theater and historical fiction. Born in Tokyo during the Meiji era,...
Automation, Tradition, and the Architecture of a Crowded Future When Isaac Asimov published The Caves of Steel in 1954, he achieved something remarkable: he fused the detective novel with hard science fiction, using the tropes of noir to explore the sociological and technological anxieties of the...
Once upon a time two merchants lived in a certain town just on the verge of a stream. One of them was a Russian, the other a Tartar; both were rich. But the Russian got so utterly ruined by some business or other that he...
Some books demand to be read not only because they pioneered something new, but because, decades later, they remain unmatched in their brilliance. Stanisław Lem’s Solaris is one of those rare works that manages to be both the first of its kind and still the...
In a certain kingdom there lived an old couple in great poverty. Sooner or later the old woman died. It was in winter, in severe and frosty weather. The old man went round to his friends and neighbors, begging them to help him to dig...
There was once an old woman who was a terrible witch, and she had a daughter and a granddaughter. The time came for the old crone to die, so she summoned her daughter and gave her these instructions: “Mind, daughter! when I’m dead, don’t you wash...
