About the book: 2021 / Peter Watts (b. 1958) is a Canadian science fiction writer, lives in Toronto. His articles on the problems of marine mammals quickly gained recognition in scientific circles, but literary success did not come immediately, and Watt collected a whole “collection of rejections,” mainly from the citadel of hard science fiction - Analog magazine. The most common reason for refusal was the “excessive negativity” of the works. However, Watts did not give up and continued to work hard. In 1990, he wrote the story “Niche,” which dealt with the problems of marine ecology, career advancement and sexual abuse, and was again rejected. Having given up on the American literary market, which he had tried in vain to conquer for almost a decade, Watts, “to justify the expense of paper and typewriter ribbon,” offered his prose to less pampered Canadian publishers and became an overnight celebrity. In particular, the story “Niche” was not only instantly published, but also awarded the Aurora Prize, after which it was republished many times in Canadian science fiction anthologies. Inspired by its success, Watts reworked The Niche into the novel Starfish (1999), which amazed readers and critics with its detailed descriptions of the seabed, received a positive review in the New York Times and received a special award at the awards. John W. Campbell. Watts is proud that Russian and German publishing houses refused to acquire the rights to translate his prose, calling it “too dark”: you have to write something that would make even the Russians scared! The continuation of the novel “Starfish” followed in 2001, and in the new novel “Whirlpool” (“Maelstrot”) the action takes place mainly on land. Contents: Rifters: 1. Starfish (Translation: Nikolay Kudryavtsev)2. Whirlpool. Igniter. Malak (Translation: Grigory Shokin, Nikolay Kudryavtsev)3. Betahemoth (Translation: Galina Solovyova, Yuri Weisberg) Sunflowers: 4. Island (Translation: Andrey Novikov)5. Upstart (Translation: AG XN)6. Giants (Translation: XN AG) False blindness: 7. False blindness (Translation: Daniel Smushkovich)8. Echopraxia (Translation: Nikolay Kudryavtsev) Novels outside the cycles: 9. On the other side of the rift (Translation: Sergey Krikun, Vladislav Zhenevsky, Nikolay Kudryavtsev)10. Firefall: False blindness. Insect gods. Colonel. Echopraxia (Translation: Nikolay Kudryavtsev, )11. Crisis. Legion (Translation: Dmitry Mogilevtsev)