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With a little surprise, I finished reading William Wang's latest collection of short stories, Wild Future. This surprise comes from a comparison of reading experiences first. As early as around 2013, when I was compiling the English version of "Post-80s Short Story Collection", I included William Wang's "Listening to the Sound of Salt Growth", which is a work set in the western salt lake, the hero's life is difficult and depressed, in the natural landscape (wonders), he perceives the cycle of the will to live, regenerating the courage of life. This work was well received by overseas translators, and when the final anthology was published abroad, the title of the novel was used as the main title.
"Listening to the Sound of Salt Growth" has highlighted the characteristics of Wang William's writing, he is good at dealing with the wrestling between personal spiritual will and external environment, the overall temperament is introverted, deep in field, full of delicate and dense narrative ability, but it can still be found in the genealogy of traditional writing: he inherits the legacy of modernist writing since the 1980s, and historizes it with his own life experience. In this way, along with other contemporaries, William Wang constructed the writer's image of himself.
This time, the 11 works included in "Wild Future" are very different, although the early style can be seen in some narrative fragments, especially the description of the environment, but the main content is already a different face. What is impressive is that a large number of elements that are only found in the usual sense of "science fiction literature" enter the novel and become important narrative devices, such as GPS positioning, video surveillance, human creation, soul chips, AI with language and self-awareness, extraterrestrial life, and so on. I realized that in Wild Future, the frame of the writing is already different, so the texture and style of the writing have also shifted at the same time.
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In "Don't See Your Eyes", "peeping" is the key word. Not only do the characters in the novel live by "peeping", but the story logic is also based on the philosophical analysis of "peeping". It's a work where the theme is more important than the story itself, but because the theme is so relevant to each of us, we lose sight of its constructivity. In the history of modern culture, "seeing" has always been an important cognitive device. In the "look" of Hokkaido's harsh natural environment, modern Japanese writers and artists discover the "truth" of reality, which constitutes the origin of modern Japanese literature. In China, Lu Xun's "slide events" constitute the core code of modern Chinese culture, and between "seeing" and "being seen", Lu Xun laid a modern narrative about "human discovery and subject awakening". In this narrative, man acquires a subject, whether capitalist or socialist. In the over-intensified vision of literary sociology, "seeing" is not simply looking, but "staring", competing for subjectivity in gaze. But this kind of "gaze" is not the only existence, Luo Yijun has a fondness for the "beauty of heavy pupils" in Yasunari Kawabata's "Snow Country": "Under Kawabata's seemingly clear but cruel and terrifying gaze, once and again, defocused, from the tightly bound innocent image of the girl's beauty, the wound and exhaustion of the muscles seeped into the soul." This is the collapse of modern vision - but not completely enough, "seeing" or its higher-order version of "gaze" is still the interaction between the eyes and the eyes, that is, the interaction between man and man; but in William Wang's time, this interaction took on a completely new form: the eye was replaced by technical tools, and sophisticated electronic instruments (cameras, video surveillance) were rewritten in both the infinite and infinite small directions of the "gaze". "Gaze" has now become "peeping." If "gaze" points to reason, consciousness, and sublimation, then "voyeurism" points to irrationality, unconsciousness, and decay. Several different sets of relationships in "Don't See You" are built in this "peeping" pattern:
I couldn't help but think that if my room was also full of cameras, I could now see what Sakura was doing -- just thinking about it, my breathing became urgent, and the tension and excitement I had never felt before. I began to calculate that I would be able to pick out a camera at the photography equipment store on my way home later. The more I thought about this behavior, the more excited I became, almost like a little boy who was going to have sex with his girlfriend for the first time. I seemed powerless to stop myself from doing so. What should I do? I was caught in the predicament of desire and morality, forgetting that I was taking pictures. I held up my camera motionlessly, like a mesmerized sculpture. Suddenly, I noticed that the girl in the camera became overwhelmed, and her face became crimson, embarrassed, and affectionate, as if she had witnessed the coming of God.
"Voyeurism" gives rise to desires that happen to be the lack of excess in postmodern society, as Susan Sontag puts it: "Photographs can stir up emotion in the most direct and utilitarian way possible— just as someone collects photographs of nameless objects of desire to satisfy masturbation desires." If photographs are used to inspire moral impulses, the situation is even more complicated. In William Wang's case, the more complicated situation is that "peeping", even if it has become an important tool for "surveillance", has been internalized as part of the emotional structure and thus drives human behavior. In this sense, "dummies" and "shadows" become "real people" – aren't camera shots and video shots "realistic" reality stitched together from symbols?
Grandfather on the Map begins with a psychic event in which a dead grandfather appears on a real-time updated GPS map. The explanation of this matter drives the interpretation of the "soul". Although William Wang was willing to discuss the issue seriously, he lacked a Socratic context and object of dialogue—in the Phaedo, Socrates calmly talked to his followers about the "theory of the immortality of the soul" before his death: "Reincarnation is really so." The birth of the living from the dead, the death of man, the soul still existing, are all real things. This "immortality" does not refer to immortality in the physiological sense, but to "it is stable and unchanging, and it blends with the unchanging, and it does not change itself." This state of the soul is called wisdom. This is the foundation of humanist philosophy, and the pursuit of eternity is the pursuit of philosophy and wisdom. In Grandfather on the Map, however, this foundation is stripped away and the soul becomes a technical event and technical practice. Through three-dimensional stereoscopic imaging, the dead grandfather is resurrected from time and comes to us, nostalgia is overtaken by technology, paradoxically, this technology creates a deeper nostalgia: "If all human beings are destroyed at this same moment, then only the figure of grandfather will be left on this planet." Since the instrument is solar-powered, his figure will move around forever until the instrument rusts and destroys. Would that be a particularly lonely sight? ”
Maybe.
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Loneliness, memories, haunting in the old days. Separation, Prairie Blue Whale, and Urban Jellyfish all deal with the ethical theme of intimacy in the age of technology. The women in "Separation" are extracted from their memories by the intelligent sensor bed developed by their ex-boyfriends, and they have to re-experience some of the mixed past experiences. The mother in "Prairie Blue Whale" is far away from her homeland, and because of her middle-aged emotions, she enters another space and engages in a "life and death dialogue" with her 120-year-old son in the belly of the blue whale. A stranger woman in "City Jellyfish" visits, who was the lover of an old classmate who has passed away. The strange thing about things is that this strange woman is so familiar, it turns out that under the appearance and shell, there is a heavy "he" that has been put away. Finally, "he/she" undresses on the already heavily polluted seashore, revealing his ceramic body.
Since the Enlightenment, the pursuit and reflection on technology has constituted a key dialectic of modern thought. In general, humanistic philosophers are pessimistic about the ethical improvements that modern technology can provide for modern life. Hölderlin was one of the first poets to think about this in poetry, and in a poem of the late 19th century, he asked, "Is there a ruler on the earth?" Absolutely not. Hölderlin's proposed solution was to return to the Greek "blue of divinity." His compatriot Heidegger partially admired Hölderlin's idea of detouring to Greece, but he was very reluctant to try to find a reconciliation between technology and ethics in "this here.". In the end he was more radical than Hölderlin, and technology made "the world into the middle of the night.". The serious binary opposition between cultural philosophy and technological philosophy has led this thinking into a narrow path, but the reality is that, for or against it, technology has become part of human life and has redefined and set the ethical life of human beings in a sense. This is the meaning of Wang William's above works, he does not think or criticize technology outside of technology, but starts from the inside of people to grasp the complex and entangled relationship between technology, technical products, technical imagination and people. This complex entanglement of relationships and the complex entanglements of human life creates an interaction and dialogue in which technology is man, man is technology—even in religious metaphors, man is nothing more than a (imperfect) work of technology by God. This is a kind of complexity that Baudrillard calls, "the complexity of the world no longer arises at the moment of symbolic exchange ... Rather, it exists in the daily life of technological objects." Wang William's works of this kind have delicate textures and subtle emotions, the quality of traditional literature has gained novelty and surprise because of the entry of science fiction, and science fiction as a genre novel has gained depth and innerness because of the substrate of traditional literature.
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"Wild Future" is a work that deserves special attention, three frustrated young people are struggling to survive in a group rental house, employment is slim and life is hopeless, but it is this situation that still can't stop Zhao Dong, an airport security guard who graduated from junior high school, from yearning for science fiction and the future. After many years, he finally fulfilled his wish and entered the future in the time and space tunnel of the airport. When the narrator "I" witnessed such a miracle of reality, "suddenly felt very lonely." It is a work that highly embedded science fiction in the present, and all its constituent elements can be called critical realism: unemployed, marginalized people, slums in the metropolis... This is a kind of writing that is very different from the classic science fiction writing landscape. In the classic science fiction writing picture, science fiction is a highly developed modern product, a marriage product of scientists, capitalists and explorers, a rational creation that points to a new life and order. But in William Wang's Wild Future, science fiction no longer plays a constructive role in these grand and distant levels, but rather science fiction escapes from the institutional imagination and is associated with ordinary and even humble life. Science fiction does not change the fate of these people, nor can it change the established order and rules of the game, but only provides a mirror of temptation.
In contemporary Chinese science fiction writing, if Liu Cixin started from "scar literature" and constructed a science fiction narrative based on realism and beyond realism, then a generation of writers such as Wang William started from "new scar literature" and avoided Liu Cixin's path and opened up a narrative path of post-science fiction writing. In Liu Cixin's generation of writers, science fiction literature is a link in the narrative of progress, and the "future" advances infinitely on the time vector, thus temporarily shelving the irreconcilable current social contradictions, and recreating the world in a new time and space with an alternative solution. This is what Liu Cixin calls "mainstream literature depicts the world that God has created, and science fiction literature creates the world like God and then describes it." As a result, science fiction literature is seen as restoring "the totality and completeness of the novel as a world system." Post-science fiction writing is skeptical of this desire to "create" and the totality of the world system, and in Planets and Memories, neither the migration of aliens nor the help of robots can free human beings from the misunderstanding of language and the genes of violence, and the new space is born of the old order. The "future" as a produced structure is already highly embedded in the present moment, so that the new world system is not outside us, but within us; not outside of time, but within time. In this sense, time has become space, a trinity of past, present, and future, existing in the three-dimensional form of multiple folds intertwined by canine teeth. Post-science fiction literature sees the myth of modernity narrative behind the old and new models (old people and new people, old world new world, old self and new me) from these wrinkled grass snake gray lines, and post-science fiction literature then stays, hesitating at each scattering point, looking forward and backward. Here, the "phantom theory" replaces the "theory of salvation", and the "new future" at the peak of the ideology of time becomes the "wild future". The future is exiled and canceled, and the future present disappears into the future, just as "water disappears into water."
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Who does the future belong to? Will there be a call function in the future? How much weight does the future hold in the quota of ethical survival?
In the dark universe are five bright stars, large and small, but because of the distance, they look like several frozen flames. These flames all have pointed tails, toward a common center. This center is the super-massive Sagittarius A black hole. Nor can light escape from the black hole, so there is nothing but darkness. I started the quantum camera, captured the quantum radiation at the interface of the black hole, and the computer quickly created a quantized image of the black hole. The huge vortex of energy made it look like the large mouth of a demon full of fangs. And I'm going to fly over that mouth and take the initiative to become its food.
This is a future scene described in William Wang's "AfterLife".
Only drift bottles and eco-balls remain in the small universe. The drift bottle is hidden in the darkness, and in the universe of a thousand meters square, only the small sun in the ecological ball emits a little light. In this small world of life, several clear water balls float quietly in a zero-gravity environment, and a small fish jumps out of one water ball, jumps into another, and swims lightly between the green algae. In a small patch of grass on land, a drop of dew broke away from a blade of grass and swirled and floated, refracting a ray of crystalline sunlight into space.
This is a scene after the death of the universe in Liu Cixin's "Three-Body Problem".
- That's the way it is.
This will be the case, the present and the future, and it will be so. Everyone was sitting in a smoothly flowing plane that had been hijacked secretly, not knowing where they were going, where their hearts were, and where their spirits were going.
This plane that exists because of its disappearance is called "the future.".
(This article is excerpted from the preface of "Wild Future": "The Possibility of Post-Science Fiction Writing", the author is a professor at the School of Literature, Chinese Min University)
《No Mirai》
King William
Published by CITIC Publishing Group
The 11 stories included in "Wild Future" range from near and far, from the impact of GPS technology on life and memory, the destruction of the real connection between people on screens, to the tampering of memory backup with the authenticity of memory, the damage of information ocean to emotions and experiences, and then to human exploration of black holes to space... Let us think about the relationship between technology, reality and the future.
The author, William Wang, born in 1982, has studied in the Department of Physics, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Chinese of Sun Sun Yat-sen University, a doctor of literature, and has authored the novel "The Rescued", the novel collection "Inner Face", "Illegal Check-in", "Listening to the Sound of Salt Growth", "Handstand Life", etc., and the collection of essays "Sorrow That Cannot Be Nomadic". Some of his works have been translated into English, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Hungarian and other languages. He has won the first "Zijin People's Literature Star" Literary Award, the October Literature Award, the Huacheng Literature Award, the Mao Dun Literary Newcomer Award, and the Gold Medal of the Chinese Science Fiction Literature Competition.
Author: Yang Qingxiang
Edit: Jin Jiuchao