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Time Really Does Run Faster Here
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 22 2026
Pages: 146
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.37 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A Novel by Vassily Rostov
In Cursov, time is not measured by the sun - it is measured by the toll on the body.
In a devastated colony planet managed by the cold bureaucratic machine of five empires in constant war, an official day lasts only sixteen hours. To the imperial administration, it looks like a accounting miracle: by converting prison sentences to the new short-day calendar, poster signs promise that convicts will serve their time and be released in far fewer years.
However, the paperwork conceals a cruel equation. The human body cannot read conversion tables. There is no discount on exhaustion, hunger, or cold. With compressed shifts and insufficient time between them for the body to recover, serving six years in Cursov ages a human being by fifteen. Those who manage to survive and return home discover that their families aged at the slow rhythm of the universe, while they carry the brutal wear and tear of a whole lifetime squeezed into a handful of years.
The Time Here Actually Runs Faster is a compelling novel about resilience, human accounting, the coldness of bureaucratic systems, and the dignity of those who strive to survive within them.
There is a handwritten phrase painted on a wall in the municipality of Dorna, in the Kholna oblast, in Vetrenia - a name that, before the five empires arrived, belonged to an entire country, with its own flag and a national anthem that some old folks, they say, still hum softly when they think nobody is listening. The phrase reads: The time here actually runs faster.
I want you to think about this with me for a second, because we are going to spend the next four hundred pages coming back to this phrase, and I would prefer you hate it right from the start for the right reasons.
A day in Cursov is sixteen hours long. It is not the planet's orbit - it is a line in an administrative regulation, signed by a man who probably looked good in a suit, had neat handwriting, and had no idea - or, worse, a perfect idea - of what he was signing. And this is where things get interesting, because you might be thinking: shorter days, okay, more days per year, so what? Let me do the math with you, slowly, because the imperial administration was counting on nobody doing it.
A standard imperial year has eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours. With twenty-four-hour days, that makes three hundred and sixty-five days. With sixteen-hour days - Cursov math -, that very same year, with the same sun rising and setting the same number of times, contains five hundred and forty-seven days. Not more hours. Not more sun. Just more days, on paper.
And sentences in Cursov are not counted in years. They are counted in served days. Do you think this is a bureaucratic coincidence? I thought so too, the first time I read the archives. It isn't.
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