Yao Wang, Bachelor of Physics, Peking University, Master of Arts in Film and Television, Communication University of China, Ph.D., Department of Chinese, Peking University. Since 2004, under the pseudonym "Xia Di", he has published the long fantasy novel "Kyushu Reverse Brigade" and the science fiction short story collection "The Bottle of the Fairy", which has won the Science Fiction Galaxy Award and the Nebula Award many times. He is currently a lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of Xi'an Jiaotong University.
A better or worse future
Text│ Wang Yao
Who are morroc?
More than a hundred years ago, H.G. Wells painted a terrible picture of the future in The Time Machine: An Invention (1895): Time travelers came to the world eight hundred thousand years later and found that the rich and poor in Victorian Britain had evolved into different species—the beautiful and delicate Elois lived in the palace on the ground, living a decadent life of doing nothing, and the Morroc people who lived underground crawled out when night fell. Preys on the defenseless Eloys. This mirror-like dual structure constitutes the classic image of the "evil trotopia", because only under the nightmarish gaze of the Morlocks, the Eloy people living in the idyllic pastoral will begin to worry about their fate.
As science fiction writer Brian Aldis put it, "For many years, whenever the future was concerned, it was nothing more than attacking or defending Wells." "This picture of the future outlined by Time Machine has always lingered like a ghost in 20th-century science fiction. The development of science and technology does not solve the problem of fairness. Environmental pollution, nuclear radiation, genetic engineering, global warming... It is always the rich who enjoy high-tech benefits, and the poor have to bear the consequences.
In "Supporting Mankind," published in 2005, Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin depicts an alien planet called "First Earth." There, the development of science and technology made "knowledge, intellect, profound thought, even perfect psychology and character, artistic aesthetic ability, etc., commodities", and thus the rich and the poor gradually divided into different species:
"Just as the poor and the dogs are not of the same species, the poor are no longer human... Sympathy for the poor, the key lies in the word 'same', when the same species base of both sides does not exist, sympathy does not exist... This is the second evolution of man, the first time separated from apes by natural selection; this time separated from the poor by another equally sacred law: private property is inviolable. ”
This sacred law is strictly enforced by a law enforcement system called the "social machine," and the poor are "punished according to law" by law enforcement robots once they use the resources belonging to the rich. Many years later, the wealth and resources of the entire planet will be concentrated in the hands of the only "terminal producer", and the remaining two billion poor people will live in fully enclosed houses, relying on "self-sufficient micro-ecological circulation systems" to sustain their lives, even paying the "terminalizers" for breathing the air outside. When resources within the circulatory system are insufficient, the poor have the option of jumping into a "resource conversion car" that breaks down the body into water and other useful resources: "a box of organic grease, a bottle of calcium tablets, and even a small piece of iron the size of a coin." ”
Liu Cixin's "First Earth" may be seen as a tribute to Wells' "Time Machine". The difference is that the "second evolution" is no longer driven by the power of natural selection, but by the laws of technology and capital. The greater the pace of "civilizational progress," the faster the polarization of the Eloys and Morrocs.
Perhaps, as Alain Badiyu put it in The Communist Vision: "In many ways we are closer to the problems of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th century." "It's just that we can no longer lament, like time travelers, about the fate of mankind in eight hundred thousand years."
We are becoming Morroc.
Second, the world is uneven
The "sense of wonder" in science fiction, in essence, comes from the dramatic encounter between two worlds, two cultures, two cognitive paradigms, or "sensory structures." Compared with "realist" literature, the advantage of science fiction lies in dealing with the "defamiliarization effect" of this shift in perspective, and conveying abstract survival experiences through highly condensed concrete images—just like the double mirror images of the Eloys and Morroc.
In today's Hollywood science fiction films, the world between "underground" and "aboveground" has become the most powerful spatial shape and visual spectacle— the new version of Total Recall (2012), the "New Asia" and "British Commonwealth" at the poles of the earth; the poor and hungry "Twelve Districts" and the rich "capital city" in "The Hunger Games" (2012); and "Upside." Down, 2012) is the gravitationally opposite "lower world" and "upper world"; the "last class" and "first class car" in Snowpiercer (2013); and the "Elysium" space station inhabited by the earth's slums and rich people in Elysium (2013).
In Hao Jingfang's Beijing Folding, the "first world" and the "third world" are not separated by a vast space, but are folded in a limited space. This picture may be closer to our current experience of existence — today's China, and even today's world, is not so much the separation between the "underground" and "aboveground" worlds as it is the intertwined teeth of the world of various heterogeneities.
In this sense, I prefer to use the set of images of "flat" and "uneven" to describe today's world. On the one hand, for urban youth who grew up with iPhones and iPads and lived in "digital utopias", "the world is flat" seems to be a very clear fact. As long as we have WiFi and smartphones, we can get the latest information anytime, anywhere, we can share the MOOCs of famous universities for free, we can chat with friends in other countries through WeChat and Skype, and intelligent translation software will solve all language barriers sooner or later. The future world seems destined to be a flat, uniform, crowded and intimate "global village". On the other hand, however, in such a seemingly flat world, there are many huge and deep gaps. As we walk through the streets and buildings every day, it seems that we never want to say hello to the cleaners, the roadside vendors. They came from a rural area or small town whose name I didn't know, and spoke a dialect I didn't understand. I was like people in two worlds with them, passing by every day, but I didn't know how to talk.
In this way, there is no possibility of dialogue between the two worlds. Those who think they live in a flat global village are doomed to fail to see the great chasms and cracks beneath the endless horizon, and to see others living unimaginable lives under the gravitational pull of heavy reality. Just as we can't see the migrant workers in cleaner's uniforms around us, we've long been accustomed to turning a blind eye to such an uneven world.
Third, cross the frontier
In Liu Cixin's "Supporting Mankind", the two billion poor people who were forced into a desperate situation on the "First Earth" had to leave their homes and take a spaceship to the earth to find a new living space. They announced that all Earth humans would be relocated to Australian reservations, and that the "First Earth" civilization would provide all means of subsistence, distributed equally among everyone, and that the distribution standard would be based on the current minimum living standard of human society on Earth. In order to eliminate the disparity between the rich and the poor on the planet as soon as possible, the "Social Wealth Liquefaction Committee", composed of the rich, began to desperately distribute huge amounts of cash to the poor and hire killers to kill the poor who refused to take money. This is where the most black humor in the novel lies: the "equalization of rich and poor" for which human beings on Earth fought bloody battles but failed to succeed can only be achieved under the strong force of another group of oppressed people.
Liu Yang's "Single Hole Diffraction", under the cloak of seemingly mysterious physics, actually tells an equally absurd story of "world unity". Due to the intervention of powerful external forces, human society had to reshuffle the cards, and the history of capitalism ended overnight. We may not want such a future to materialize, but it is like a black mirror that reflects the status quo that we are powerless to shake in the present, and at the same time, it also indicates the impulse to break the "principle of reality" and flee elsewhere. In such "science fantasy", we see a repressed utopian desire, a Jedi counterattack of the Morroc from underground against the Eloys.
In the preface to Archaeologies Of The Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Frederick Jameson argues that when alternative institutions have not yet emerged and are not practical, the meaning of utopia is not merely to propose and conceive of a way of social organization different from the present world, but as a method. Its significance lies in revealing the limitations of our imagination of the future. Imagination is always difficult to imagine, which is completely different from the "alternatives" of the present, and what is even more difficult is to make the alternative imagination acceptable to the general reader, "that is, utopia can at best be used for negative purposes: it makes us more aware of the ideological and ideological confinement to which we are subjected."
This raises another question for us: Does today's science fiction have the ability to imagine a better future, in addition to depicting a variety of "bad futures"?
In my opinion, the core charm of science fiction lies in breaking the limits of various ideas, to think in ways that were previously considered impossible, to know the "unknown", to understand the "other", to get out of the small circle delineated by "common sense", to explore the frontier between things that can be understood and incomprehensible, between things that can be said and cannot be said. In this process, rational "cognition" and emotional "understanding" are equally important, only in this way can we balance the tension between "scientific speculation" and "humanistic art" - through the rational and materialistic scientist's vision, science fiction elevates the individual to the height of the universe to know human beings; at the same time, the dimension of humanities and arts requires us to shoulder the moral responsibility of understanding each stranger, encourage our curiosity about the unknown, respect for differences, and the courage to cross the frontier. Thus entering the world of others in all its forms.
At this important historical moment, I am more and more convinced that to change reality, we cannot rely solely on science and technology, but also let millions of ordinary men, women, and children know that life should be better and can be so, but it requires imagination, courage, action, unity, love and hope, and a little understanding and sympathy for strangers. This is a valuable quality that everyone is born with, and it is also the best thing that science fiction can bring us.
——Published in Novel Monthly, No. 4, 2015
"Novel Monthly" 2015 No. 4 [Open Narrative] column launched the "Science Fiction Literature Series": selected Hao Jingfang's novel "Beijing Folding" (original "Literary and Art Wind Award", No. 2, 2014), Liu Yang's novel "Single Hole Diffraction" (original "Literary and Art Wind Award", No. 6, 2014), and Wang Yao's commentary "Better or Worse Future"
novelette
Watch the sunset in Victoria Harbour __ Teng Xiaolan
(From Harvest, No. 1, 2016)
Beauty walk __ stupid
(Selected from People's Literature, No. 2, 2016)
Emergency collection __ clothes to the east
(Selected from PLA Literature and Art, No. 2, 2016)
Father __ Chen Xi I
(From Flower City, No. 1, 2016)
short story
Private __ east and west
(From The Writer, No. 2, 2016)
East Sea, East Sea __ Zhou Li Li
(From Man seed, No. 1, 2016)
One hundred yuan __ Zhang Yuqing
(Selected from People's Literature, No. 1, 2016)
Summer trepidation __ silent
(Excerpt from Tianya, No. 2, 2016)
Open narrative
Chinese Savage __ Fang Wei
(From Youth Literature, No. 2, 2016)
History is not "elsewhere" (creative talk) __ Fang Wei
Cover two topics
Writer Present Tense: Fan Xiaoqing
Novel Monthly, No. 4, 2016, April 1, 2016, No. 436
Novella title
Changting town __ sea flying
(From October, No. 1, 2016)
Holy Land __ Chen Jiming
Those years of love enemies __ Lu led the bow
(From Shanghai Literature, No. 2, 2016)
Vaulting horse __ Zhu Xiaolin
(From Beijing Literature, No. 3, 2016)
Once upon a time there was a temple __Chen Cang
(Excerpted from Times Literature, No. 1, 2016)
Business __ even advises
(Excerpted from Novel World, No. 1, 2016)
Singer __ Surando
(Excerpted from Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 1, 2016)
Gada Merlin __ Wang Fangchen
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Ethics __ Chen Binxian
(Excerpted from Qingming, No. 1, 2016)
Where is this body _ Wei Jianhua
(Excerpted from Tianya, No. 1, 2016)
Novel Monthly magazine 2016 supplement 2 issue novella special issue, published in April 2016