She switches to the backstroke after ten laps. Ten more and she rolls over again; breaststroke. She has waterproof headphones and an audiobook going.
"The stuff that's still read is usually still read because it's good along multiple axes - cultural resonance and linguistic sophistication disappear in machine translation but a good manual translation can keep it or transform it."
"I like some science fiction, but more for the—exploration of our capabilities, of the ways society would or could be—that aspect. So that's sort of hit-and-miss, when it's miss it misses badly but when it's hit it's pretty good. I like stuff that explores the way society—is, the day-to-day things, the way people live their lives, especially in other castes and other cultures. And I like speculative fiction."
"Science fiction about future technology gets incredibly dated so it's convenient that's not the kind you're into. Hmm, how do you feel about time travel?"
"Bit o' both, and also some of the more—sciencey parts, I guess those would be mostly green but I can't imagine blues don't learn some of that social psychology and economics."
"You know, I'd actually expect them to, I'd stereotypically expect that blues probably don't care about the subject matter as much as greens do so the author had better make it otherwise interesting."
"But they don't need all blues to pop out of school ready to do things, they can mostly live off investments."
"I suppose that's true, they wouldn't need to make it that much more otherwise-interesting."
"I wonder if blues' teachers have a hard time interesting the students in things when on no level are the things going to be necessary in later life per se."
"I dunno, I like to think that I'd still want to learn stuff and work even if I didn't have to to eat."
"Oh, sure, some of 'em, I guess maybe there's selective blue schools, but even the kids who don't want to, of whom I assume there are many, still need to show up to class."
"I suppose. On the other hand that might make for some clever ways of holding kids' attention in class."
"When I was a kid I loved a lot of the games they market to little blues, maybe they play those all day."