It Could Be Anything
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy short science fiction and want a story they can finish quickly
- Science fiction fans who want to practice reading in the original English
- Those interested in the style of Golden Age science fiction short stories
- Teachers and organizers who need short material for classes or book clubs
Not a good fit for
- Hard science fiction readers expecting a long world-building and complex setting
- Readers who prefer serious literary depth and analysis
- Beginners whose English reading is not yet fluent and who do not want to look up words
Reading tips
- Read it straight through first without looking up words, to feel the rhythm and the twist.
- On a second pass, mark key premises and dialogue, and think about how the title relates to the plot.
- After reading, write a short review of about a hundred words recording your understanding of the open-ended premise.
- If using it for a book club, prepare two or three questions about interpreting the ending for discussion in advance.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this novel long or short?
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About the author
Keith Laumer (1925–1993), born John Keith Laumer, was an American science fiction writer from Syracuse, New York. He served in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a foreign diplomat, experiences that informed the action and satire in his later writing. In 1959 he published his first science fiction story, "Greylorn," and entered the field of science fiction. His representative works include the "Bolo" series, centered on self-aware super tanks, and the "Retief" series, which satirizes diplomatic life; he also excelled at time-travel and parallel-world themes, and his work is often marked by tight plotting and dry humor. He was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards multiple times and had a notable influence on twentieth-century American science fiction.
