Editor's Note:
SF Book Club is an internal book exchange club initiated by Yao Haijun and initiated by the Science Fiction World Book Department, and the members involved in the book club include book lovers from various departments of the magazine. The book club, called SF Salon, is both a Science Fiction salon and a See u Friday salon. The friends of the science fiction world will get together on one Friday afternoon every month, chatting, eating and drinking, Amway spitting and brainstorming.
SF Salon wants to do science fiction book clubs, but not only book clubs. Salon topics will include science fiction books, science fiction authors, science fiction literary phenomena, and science fiction films, animations, games, peripherals and everything about science fiction that can be derived from this. The future of SF Salon has countless possibilities.
The recent SF Book Club will have offline open activities to be released, so the review of previous events will be pushed one after another, welcome to continue to pay attention to the public account of the science fiction world for details
Phase IV
Theme: A different superhero - "Watchmen"
Where: Sai Fan Sci-Fi Space Cafe
On the last Friday of 2017, we hosted the last SF Book Club of 2017.
The host of this book club, Song Shan, brought his favorite American comic "Watchmen" and talked to us about different superheroes. From DC to Marvel, from comics to movies, from individual stories to integrated alliances and universes, Captain America, Iron Man, Superman, Batman, etc. have become household names for superheroes, the best accessories for holidays, and the idols of children's dreams. But this book club, the "Watchmen" we discussed, is an anti-hero story. "Since ancient times, beautiful people are like heroes, and no white heads are allowed in the world", but the opening of the comic book brings us into a world where most of the heroes retired and lived in despair. But this is not exactly a Wolverine-style story filled with the tragic and desolate feelings of the hero's end, as the story unfolds, these characters are either violent or cowardly, in the tide of the times, involuntary, completely different from the superheroes we are accustomed to, full of absurd and vain feelings.
The host looks for the origins of american comics from the long history, from prehistoric murals to satirical comics to the original frame storyboard. Then he took us through a brief history of American comics over the past 100 years. Comics from cheap magazines sent to the battlefield during World War II; the Golden Age of 1938-1955, the great censorship of comics at the end of the Golden Age; the Silver Age of 1956-1970, where heroes have more and more humanity, and Stan Lee, now the king of Easter eggs in Marvel movies, has also appeared in the comic book industry. The Bronze Age of 1970-1985, following the surging counter-mainstream cultural movement, comics also turned their attention to the social crux of the problem and began to pinpoint the shortcomings of the times; since the black iron age after 1986 - postmodern (also known as the modern era), as well as the "British invasion" event in the American comic industry, the rise of graphic novels in this period, many comic book authors consciously integrated the connotation and thinking of mainstream literature in comics, in addition to the popular superhero comics, there are Pulitzer Prize-winning "Rat Family", Therefore, it can be seen as a honeymoon period between American comics and mainstream literature. In addition to winning the Hugo Award, the protagonist of our book club, "Watchmen", was selected into the list of "Top 100 English Novels Since 1923" by Time Magazine in the United States, and it is also a comic book work in the same rank as classic masterpieces such as "Clockwork Orange", "Catcher in the Rye", and "Gone with the Wind".
This is a beautiful book with a serious temperament, which is completely different from the imagination, its reflection and discussion on social issues, the pursuit and portrayal of philosophy, aesthetics, and especially symmetrical composition, let us see that any culture, mainstream, non-mainstream, elite, and popular, can grow towering trees in their own soil. Of course, the book club can not let go of the industry gossip, about the "Watchmen" author Alain Moore and the former owner DC Comics copyright feud, and now the career of the stick; "American Gods" author Neil Gaiman grew up with the love and dedication to comics, but also served as Moore's giant human flesh allusion library during the creation of "Watchmen" and other anecdotes...
At the book club, we also watched the opening clip of the "Watchmen" movie, and had a more intuitive understanding of the probabilistic historical background and details of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union; the inserted comic "Legend of the Black Ship" was full of metaphors, and the psychedelic and absurd plot had already hinted at the tragedy of destiny; in addition, it also opened a brain hole about Chinese superhero comics... Finally, here's the list of books recommended by this book club:
V-Kills, written by Alain Moore
Batman: Deadly Joke, written by Alain Moore
Swamp Monster series, written by Alain Moore
The Sleeping Devil series, written by Neil Gaiman
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, written by Frank Miller
Wolverine: Old Logan, written by Mark Miller
Amazing Man, written by Curt Bussik
Civil War, written by Mark Miller
Rat Clan, written by Art Spiegelman
Kingdom of Heaven, written by Mark Wilder
Superman: Children of Red, written by Mark Miller
Doomsday Bells, written by Jeff Jones
The Chronicles of the Gods: American Comics, by Jiang Yehua
American Comics Overview 2010: Superman Can't Fly, by Jiang Yehua
A History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts