The Doorway
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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy mid-twentieth-century American magazine science fiction short stories
- English learners who want to practice reading with short original English texts
- Free readers interested in public-domain eBooks from Project Gutenberg
- People who want a light twenty-minute read during a commute or before sleep
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting long-form world-building and hard science fiction technical premises
- Readers who prefer contemporary narrative techniques and complex character arcs
- Readers who need a Chinese translation and cannot easily read the English original
Reading tips
- Read it through in one go first, then look back at the opening setup to see how the ending's twist was foreshadowed.
- When reading the English original, keep unfamiliar words to three to five per page and prioritize narrative continuity.
- Read it alongside other short stories by the same author to see whether the satirical tone remains consistent.
- After reading, write a three-to-five-sentence summary to check whether you have grasped the core premise and the characters' motivations.
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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About the author
Evelyn E. Smith (1922–2000) was an American writer of science fiction and mystery fiction, born in New York, who also worked as a crossword puzzle constructor. In the 1950s she published numerous short science fiction stories in magazines such as Galaxy Science Fiction and Fantastic Universe. Her representative works include "The Blue Tower," "The Venus Trap" and "The Doorway," along with "The Most Sentimental Man," "Collector's Item," "The Princess and the Physicist" and "The Man Outside"; seventeen of her works are held in this collection. Her short stories often treat alien contact, gender relations and consumer society with wit and humour, showing neat plotting and a satirical edge. Under the pen name Delphine C. Lyons she also wrote Gothic romances and the "Miss Melville" mystery series. Public information about her life is limited, and discussion of her work focuses mainly on these magazine stories and her genre fiction.
