Not long ago, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro's new work "Clara and the Sun" came out simultaneously around the world, once again paying attention to the theme of science fiction and the future. In recent years, British and American serious literary writers have become more and more involved in science fiction themes, in addition to Ishiguro Kazuo, there are also British writers Ian McEwen, Canadian writers Margaret Atwood, American writer Thomas Pynchon and so on.
Recently, Yilin Publishing House launched a new work "Zero K" by contemporary American literary giant Don Derrillo, which was introduced Chinese Simplified the world for the first time. Delireau's science fiction novel, set somewhere deep in the desert of Central Asia, is about one of the hot social technology topics of the moment, cryonics and the temptation of eternal life, and explores a fundamental question: If we don't die at the end of our lives, what is the point of living?
In 1996, Yilin Publishing House first introduced Derrillo's work "Libra Constellation", which was the first publishing house in China to translate Delillo. Over the past 25 years, the Translation Society has continued to track his creative progress, and the published "Derrillo Works" series includes important representative works such as "Libra Constellation", "White Noise", "Underworld", "Name" and so on, and the appearance of "Zero K" has added to this series.
It is reported that the new work "Silence" published by Derrillo in October last year has also been included in the plan, and the translated version of the "Derrillo Works" series will likely become the most complete collection of Driro's works in the world Chinese.
Closest to eternity, closest to death:
Cryonics and the temptation of eternal life
Promising eternal life in the future, would you choose to be frozen when you are healthy? Derrillo's new science fiction work makes this assumption: when deeply afraid of death, humans instinctively choose to reach the end of the world. As the book begins, "Everyone wants to have the end of the world." ”
The English title "Zero K" is taken from the Kelvin temperature, which means "-273°C", at which the molecule no longer has kinetic energy. The title of the novel points directly to the theme: a new technology that can infinitely prolong human life, cryonics, which preserves life and is closest to death. Against this backdrop, Derrillo asks a key question: "If we don't die at the end of our lives, what's the point of living?" ”
The book's two protagonists, billionaire Rose Lockhart, who invested in a human cryonics agency "aggregation" deep in the desert, and he and his wife Artie plotted a self-destruction process in which they would be preserved in top-secret freezing until one day, resurrected with the help of cell regeneration and nanotechnology. In the future, human beings will have the opportunity to regenerate in a new image, and all memories can be implanted into the brain according to individual choices. Those who eventually emerge from the freezer will be non-historical humans. They will get rid of those straight horizontal lines of the past, those decayed minutes and seconds.
Postmodern limit state:
The ultimate fusion of de Driro's creative themes
Zero K is a new work by Driro, inheriting Driro's consistent themes and writing style. From technology to the lure of mass media, to the magic of money and the fears created by chaos... Derrillo's lifelong themes run through this new work, which is another popular work after "Underworld".
Thematically, Zero K bears a number of similarities with his last work, Omega Point, both of which use the desert as an image to reflect on the fate of mankind in the context of modern technological civilization. At the same time, Zero K also incorporates many motifs from works such as White Noise and Underworld, such as technology, war, consumerism and terrorism. He seeks to dispel the fear of many factors in postmodern society by constructing a techno-utopia. In terms of writing style, "Zero K" uses the monologue commonly used by Driro in the middle and late period, in which the monologue myth of one of the protagonists, Artie, after entering the frozen state, constitutes the chapter "Artie Martino", and the exploration of the identity of the individual's existence, the broken and restrained language, all present a postmodern limit state.
Deliró delved into the ambiguous boundaries between life and death, combined with the development of human technology, and tried to find answers to the question of the ultimate fate of mankind in both religion and science.
Derrillo said of the book: "A lot of people see death as a problem, they try their best to escape death, I'm not writing this book to say that I'm going to freeze myself in the future, I haven't taken death seriously, but I think that for many people, freezing people is not a way out, at least a little better than not being able to think." Yangtze Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Huang Yanwen
Proofread by Xu Heng
Source: Purple Cow News