The Unlearned
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy mid-twentieth-century American short science fiction and want to finish a piece quickly
- English learners who want to practice extensive reading of science fiction with public-domain English ebooks
- Organizers of book clubs or classes who need short English selections with a focused theme
- Reflective readers interested in science fiction motifs such as learning and the disciplining of knowledge
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer full-length novels and elaborate world-building
- Researchers who need detailed author studies or work chronologies
- Readers who are not used to reading English originals and rely on translations
Reading tips
- Read the story through once to grasp the plot, then go back and see how the title “The Unlearned” corresponds to the text.
- Use sticky notes to mark passages involving learning, memory, or social rules, and after finishing, sort out the author’s hypothesis.
- Read it alongside other public-domain short stories by the same author to sense his usual science fiction setups and ways of closing.
- If English reading is difficult, look up key words first and then read through, avoiding sentence-by-sentence translation that breaks the narrative rhythm.
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 book a novel or a short story? Is it suitable to finish in one sitting?
Can readers with no background in science fiction understand it?
Can the ebook version be obtained for free?
What can I do if reading the English original is difficult?
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About the author
Raymond F. Jones (1915–1994) was an American science fiction writer born in Salt Lake City, Utah. His 1952 novel This Island Earth is his best-known work and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1955; he also wrote such novels as Renaissance and The Year of Stardust Fell. The collection here holds nine of his works, including Human Error, The Memory of Mars, The Unlearned, Cubs of the Wolf, The Memory of Mars (Japanese edition), The Great Gray Plague, The Colonists, and A Stone and a Spear, most of them short stories and novellas that often explore technological error, Mars exploration, and the limits of human understanding. His short fiction was nominated for the Hugo Award, and he held a place in the golden age of mid-twentieth-century American science fiction magazines. Public information about his life and career is limited, and existing accounts center mainly on the works listed above.
