No it hasn't - you're relying on a surface area map, not volume of water. Here's a partial list of estimated volumes over that time frame (in cubic km):

Oh, there were definitely long lines - and a whole culture of queuing. (When I was learning Russian, that's how we practiced instrumental case: "who's behind whom?") For a very funny portrait of queuing culture, check out Sorokin's The Queue (Очередь), which I think NYRB has just released in English.

If you ever make it to Los Angeles, there's a delightfully weird museum here (The Museum of Jurassic Technology) that hosts a portrait gallery of Russian dogs lost in space.

That's my favorite Lem, incidentally.

Well, I wouldn't overstate that first line: there are some real differences even before transliteration. Russian stresses its only O, in the second syllable (raBOta), Czech its first O (RObota), so they don't sound much alike in practice. How Russia got rabota is interesting but maybe too wonky for this board. It…

Definitely do! To be honest, despite R.U.R. being so influential and important to the genre, I think it's a relatively weak piece. It was also his first professional attempt at fiction (an SF play? Sure!), and he got a lot better after that. For his other SF work, I think there's a decent translation of Factory for…

Yes, The Village has been translated, though with an odd title: Those Who Survive. It's mostly known in this country, if at all, through the Tarasov film (Перевал).

I don't totally disagree, but on that last point, I think the invasion of Prague showed just how short of a leash those countries had to exercise their own social and cultural development. Czechoslovakia could do its own thing, provided its own thing was approved by Moscow, and when Dubček allowed it to stray too far,…

Forgot to mention on your last point: not quite central Asia and fairly mild in its SFish material, but do you know Fazil Iskander's Goat-Ibex Constellation? It's a satire of Lysenkoism and Khrushchev-era scientific experiments to increase yields and productivity - by creating a goat-ibex crossbreed. It's only mildly…

Yeah, I was trying to think of an equivalent, and all I could think of was "a bunch of different Livejournal groups" that basically just discuss whatever. Hardly a 1:1 equivalent.

Solved, as per the comment thread above/below (depending on how DISQUS orders them). Hoorah for amateur sleuthing (that a professional could have figured out in five minutes, probably.)

Ah, so now it makes sense. The story is using "amba" in the sense of "plateau," the father mishears and thinks they said "ambo," for both, which I now see is a common lottery term (which the father says, but I didn't understand the relevance). I guess the English editor thought it was more important to stress the…

Definitely. Orwell tells us as much, but I think he wanted to "correct" what he saw as the book's deficiencies and write something more transparently relevant for his political goals. Which is fine, and there's no doubt Orwell's novel has been vastly more influential, but I do think Zamyatin's is a better work of art.

Because you are a person of taste.

Happens all the time, unfortunately. I get why the Strugatskys' Predatory Things of the Century doesn't sound quite natural in English, but it's far better than the Sixth Circle of Paradise we got. Which title sounds more exciting? Sheesh.

Helpful to read Zamyatin in the context of Nietzsche, specifically The Birth of Tragedy: Apollo v. Dionysus, where modern Europe's quest to over-Apollo itself (too much organization, too much rationality, at the expense of our deeper impulses) will destroy us. In effect, Zamyatin is using SF to allegorize Nietzsche,…

You're both sorta right? It comes from the Czech robota, which shares a common root with the Russian rabota. And the word was coined not by Karel Čapek, but by his brother Josef. Karel had wanted to call them labori, but admitted it wasn't very catchy.

"Quadraturin," from that collection, is my favorite short story of his, though it's more on the fantasy/Kafkaesque spectrum; the title story is also very good, a nightmarish time travel story. If you find a copy of his quasi-novel The Letter Killers Club: it's about a clandestine group of storytellers, one of whom…

Not sure what's objectionable there: it's a basic tenet of Lenin's writing. Also: chill?

Partially lifted from Nabokov: he has a group of girls in Ada wearing "yellow-blue Vass sweaters."