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The Misplaced Battleship

Harry Harrison

The Misplaced Battleship

Original publication
1960
Bilingual edition
June 12, 2026
Pages
67
Difficulty
★☆☆
Genres
Science Fiction, Adventure
Translated from
English

Book summary

Humorous science-fiction novella published in 1960. James diGriz, known as “Slippery Jim”, a brilliant former con man forcibly recruited by the Special Corps, a secret police force operating among the stars, is bored filing archives when he discovers that Cittanuvo, a small peaceful planet, is secretly building a giant battleship of a type that vanished a thousand years ago. He sets off alone to investigate, disguised as an admiral, and his discovery draws him into a chase across the galaxy. A lively, ironic tale told by a hero as clever as he is insolent.

The plot

A thief on the trail of a stolen ship. Jim diGriz was a master thief. A secret galactic police force has hired him: it takes a thief to catch a thief.

The world of the book

A future where war has vanished. Humans live in peace on many planets. The last great warship was scrapped more than a thousand years ago.

The author

Harry Harrison, 1925 – 2012. Harry Harrison was born in 1925 near New York. As a soldier in the Second World War, he was so bored that he learned Esperanto, a language invented so that all peoples could understand one…

The benefits of the bilingual method with Line-by-line synced layout

Every line of the original has its translation directly beneath it, at the same height. You never lose your place: your eye drops one line and lands on exactly the sentence it just read. This is the layout that lets you open a book in a language you barely know without ever giving up, and compare the two texts almost word for word.

The excerpt shows the method using another book from the catalogue, not this one.

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