Check and Checkmate
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who like Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and want his short fiction
- Science-fiction readers interested in power games and thought experiments about rules
- Learners who need free English original eBooks for reading practice
- Literature enthusiasts studying twentieth-century American science-fiction short stories
Not a good fit for
- Science-fiction readers expecting long epic world-building and complex settings
- Readers who prefer light entertainment and fast-paced adventure
- Beginners with weak English reading skills who need Chinese annotation support
Reading tips
- Read through once to grasp the plot direction, then revisit key dialogue to note the choices characters make under constraints.
- Read alongside other works by Miller to observe his recurring themes of institutions and human nature.
- For the English original, read one or two chapters a day; guess unfamiliar words before looking them up to keep the reading 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
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
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- 6
FAQ
Is this book a novel or a short story?
Can I read it without having read other works by Miller?
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About the author
Walter M. Miller (1923–1996) was an American science fiction writer. Seven of his works are included in this catalog: Conditionally Human, The Ties That Bind, Death of a Spaceman, Way of a Rebel, The Hoofer, Check and Checkmate, and It Takes a Thief. Public information about him is limited, and biographical details are difficult to verify. These titles nonetheless show that he worked mainly in the short-story form, dealing with space adventure, human predicaments, and moral choice. His narratives are concise and often marked by grim irony and reflection. Most of these pieces appeared during the mid-twentieth-century golden age of science fiction magazines, balancing technical speculation with psychological portraiture and embedding concerns about civilization and individual fate within the popular framework of genre fiction, leaving a modest influence on later short science fiction.
