Zongcheng
We had to cross on foot
solar system
Before finding the first thread of my red sweater,
I had a hunch about it.
Somewhere in the universe hangs my heart,
Fire bursts from there, shaking the air,
And to the other wild hearts.
- Eddit Sodgran
Diptera writes very slowly.
For a while, she read updated novels on Douban, one a year. During this period, he was affirmed by several awards, such as: the 2018 Blancpain Ideal Country Literature Award Preliminary Selection, the Galaxy Award Reader Nomination Award, and the Fourth Douban Reading Essay Contest Near Future Science Fiction Story Group First Prize. But in the eyes of many more people, she is an unknown writer. Out of the domestic science fiction circle, ask others, who is Diptera? Most people shake their heads, and this is the fate of their contemporaries — fiction is a lonely business.
But back in their own house, the fish sank into the water. Diptera became a wanderer in the magnificent fantasy world and began his own novel game. "One hour in the afternoon, eight hundred to one thousand words per hour, almost a month." She describes her creative process in Douban Reading, "Spiritual Sampling," submitted. The following year, "Works of Art from the Age of Reproduction." The following year, Space Go. The following year, "The Rooster Prince." Writing science fiction is sometimes a person trying to solve a natural proposition through art. ”
The Rooster Prince
During the time of immersion, she silently refined her novel skills. She was a doctor of philosophy at the National People's Congress, not a pure literary bureau, and she regarded literature as a hobby, but rarely socialized for it. After she finished writing the novel, she would send it to the teacher, and the teacher's advice was that the philosophy was too entangled and could be considered. Her emphasis on philosophical expression in the early days of her work, how to present the metaphysical more popularly, is a test of the novelist's ability, and the answers to the two-winged order are "The Rooster Prince" and "The Lynx School". The first book sold fairly well, the second book was not read, Douban scored 9 points, 13 people evaluated, in the lively 2020, this is almost a forgotten novel.
Mu Ming, a writer of the same generation, lamented: "The Lynx School of the Two-Winged Order was published in May last year. At that time, I asked her why there was no waist seal recommendation, and joked that she wanted to write a book review, called "The Story without a Waist Seal". More than half a year has passed, and various lists and awards at the end of the year have been announced, and there is no shortage of familiar teachers and friends, who are encouraged and also lament the situation of this book. In the past four or five years of writing, I have gradually gained a certain understanding of the industry, and one of the deep feelings is that even in the field of novels, which has high expectations for reading ability, the places where words can reach are constantly changing. A well-written copy, a group of celebrity endorsements, or even a photo of a book may be more of an interest in reading than the text itself. ”
And Diptera continued to cultivate. In daily life, she also has her own heavy work, in the social animal style of contemporary migrant workers, the novel is the warm comfort of the sleepy flesh in the quiet night, and the diptera uses it as a container for the imagination. For example, "Space Go", which is included in the short story collection "The Rooster Prince", the origin of the novel comes from the imagination of three-dimensional Go:
"The black and white chess pieces are suspended on the three-dimensional chessboard, should not be constrained by gravity, and the most reasonable place is the cosmic space." The board can be rotated and can become very large. Players in a gravity-free environment must even enter the board and place their pieces. Space Go thus becomes a truly competitive sport that requires both brain power and elegant movements. ”
So, where does imagination reach? The answer given by Diptera is: consciousness renewal.
Those spiritual fragments eventually lead to a collision with solid experience. If the novel is just a repetition of old experiences, then even if the story is curious and reversed, it will eventually be bored by the reader. Diptera hopes to use fantasy to allow readers to escape from old experiences, but what if the same thing is looked at from another angle? If technology changes the way humans see the world, will human consciousness and the moral precepts of human society be renewed?
Therefore, Diptera will speculate in Space Go about new possibilities of human consciousness. She believed in a deep computational logic, imagining that human consciousness might come from the order of a disordered world, as a kind of entropy reduction. "The intuition in the subconscious may also be an algorithm formed over the years, a mode of existence of wisdom imprinted on the structure of matter."
This idea is certainly an unproven speculation, but in the novel, it is already an enlightening enough idea, and similar brain insights are found in the two collections of novels" "The Rooster Prince" and "The Lynx School", in which the author tries to find a combination of light and heavy speculative fiction narrative tone.
It can be said that Diptera uses fiction as a way of imagining the world. She follows some of the genre elements of science fiction, "Space Go", "The Rooster Prince" and even "Lynx School" have no shortage of grand future ideas, such as thinking about algorithms, brain neuroscience, 3D printing and other issues, but carefully reading the novels of the two wings, we will find that she consciously challenges the increasingly solidified genre narrative, the narrative time of her works is not limited to the future, the narrative language is also classically sculpted, in terms of text, the wings are not inferior to the peers published in pure literary journals.
In the author's two published novels, The Rooster Prince and the Lynx School, each novel can be understood as a deduction of a situation, such as the interpretation of 3D printing technology in "Works of Art in the Age of Reproduction", "The Rooster Prince" explores the origin and limitations of moral propositions through artificial intelligence, brain neuroscience in "Mental Sampling", computationalism in "Space Go", and the profound responses of "Lynx School" and "We Must Walk Through the Solar System" to the heliocentric and geocentric cosmology. The novel of the two-winged order is based on speculation, but this speculation is not a hollowness, but a question of the essential proposition of human beings and a mysterious contemplation of the possibilities of human society.
In the preface to The Lynx School, Diptera confesses: "Suppose a worldview, make a narrative that subverts the reader's existing cognitive patterns, the most perfect situation, so that the reader gets the ultimate happiness from heliocentrism to geocentricism, from Newton to Einstein." This cognitive pleasure is associated with how humans transcend their species and have long survived in literature. It has always been conceived in the aesthetics of science, a source of privilege and heavy fate for great scientists, and a goal that science fiction writers have always pursued. ”
The Lynx School
In The School of Lynx, she fictionalizes an important group of natural philosophers called the Lynx. "Members of the school believe that the sharp eyes of the lynx symbolize the perspective of insight into nature." Diptera introduces the history of the lynx school in a non-fictional narrative tone, from its development to its demise, from the pope's prohibition of Galileo's propaganda of heliocentrism, to the fierce debate between Leibniz and Newton's defender Clarke. Marked by the Lynx School, Diptera began to break through the limitations of time, trying to combine fantasy with medieval and modern stories, using non-fiction to fiction, and interpreting different ways of thinking in whimsy. Under this reading line, the "Lynx School" of the biptera is more like Umberto Echo's "The Name of the Rose", although in terms of narrative and intellectual volume, young novelists can not be compared with Echo's letter hand, but the diptera has shown its own depth of thinking, when most writers of the same era are satisfied with the successful experience of mass production, the biptera is moving towards a more difficult road and traveling a long way. In front of her, it may be a spectacular failure, or it may be a stylistic innovation. Marked by the Lynx School, she is actually moving towards the broad world of speculative fiction.
The Lynx School is not only a mysterious story, but also contains the concept of a biplateral novel. The narrator expounds the characteristics of the lynx school through the mouth of the character, and one paragraph reads: "Then Breschock said, 'The gaze of the lynx can penetrate the inner cause and effect and natural change of things, and they can discover not only what is obvious, but also what is hidden."' The lynx's gaze is exactly the characteristic of the ideal novelist, and only with the ability to see "hidden things" can the novelist not stay on the noisy surface, but reach down and explore the subtle crevices under the surface.
Along the Lynx School, we come to the controversy between heliocentrism and geocentrism, behind which are two different perceptions of the world. The School of Lynx is like an unfinished chapter, and its aftersound is taken over by the novel We Must Walk Across the Solar System. In this novel, Diptera fictionalizes a life form called Talos, which lives in Jupiter's moon system, and their understanding of the world is not yin and yang, black and white, right and wrong, and their rhythm of life stems from the complex pull of the tidal gravity of Jupiter's system. The novel fictionalizes the contact between the two different life forms of "Ka" and "Talos", and uses "walking in the solar system" as the core of the novel, deducing a stubborn and romantic novel texture. And these two different systems of thought continue the light of Copernicus's proposal of heliocentrism and Bruno's defense of truth even if he is burned to death. Today we know that the earth is not the center of the universe, nor is the sun, but the pursuit of truth by previous generations, although the recklessness and courage of millions of people, are still the power to touch people's hearts, and this is the charm of "We Must Walk Through the Solar System".
In the accounts of members of the Lynx School, "God has created countless possible worlds, and He may have chosen the best one and regarded it as heaven, but that is not our universe." Our geocentric universe happens to be an example of his more failure, and we humans happen to be his more failed people. In the universe centered on the sun, or something else, humanity has been looking outward for a better world, never trapped by the narrow stellar sky. Here, the discussion of geocentrism and heliocentrism among lynx schools is no longer "what is the truth of the world", but "how should we see the world", a question of whether human beings should be self-centered. It then becomes a question of the mind itself, a question of the way humans see the world. Acknowledging geocentric theory, being self-centered, we are likely to lead to a narrative of arrogance and even self-deception, while endorsing heliocentrism, or a universe centered on something else, is the first step in acknowledging human narrow-mindedness and outward pursuit of a better world.
Throughout the published works, diptera novels excel in subtle philosophical speculation, a structure as fine as a cogwheel bite, and a focus on language. Among domestic science fiction writers, the problem awareness of diptera novels is very clear, each of her novels has a strong curiosity about a problem, and she is good at using a clever story to convey philosophical thinking to the audience. If I want to talk about the room for progress, I myself will feel that after reading through it, the author can try to express the philosophically entangled sentence patterns in a more lifelike way. The shaping of the characters may be more diverse, such as in the tone of the characters' speech, more recognizable, adding some more life-like details, leaving a few idle pens between the fine words, so that the texture of the novel will be more relaxed and comfortable, and the characters of the novel will be more intimate and tangible to the reader. Just like Chekhov's Wanka and Nabokov's Humbert, whether it is writing about intellectuals or other groups, they can work harder in language, action, interaction between people, and even the situation they are in, grasp the characters' glimpses in life, see the real chapter in the subtleties, an outstanding novelist, even if he writes ordinary things, ordinary people, can also write a feeling of great fear, even if it is to say the big truth, he can also be silent, in the small people seem to have a pair of interactions, Tell the story of the world's morals. A wise writer knows how to hide the wisdom of the novel, and a great work can take into account both the concept and the character, in the final analysis, it is the consideration of the world view, and the mature work relies on the mature, sufficiently complex world view, driven by this world view, the embodiment of human nature will naturally be richer.
This article discusses the novels of the biplanet order, and also uses this to re-mention the "speculative novel". Speculative fiction is a concept that covers a wider range than science fiction and speculative fiction, but there is still a lack of in-depth research in China. For a long time, science fiction is limited to the subject matter, easy to be circled as a work based on science and future imagination, on the one hand, it cuts the narrative theme of the writer, on the other hand, it is easy to limit the expression of the novel, entangled in the imagination of the future, the deliberation of scientific theorems, but different in the excavation of human nature, in response to the reader's confusion in the real world, it is inevitable that there is a feeling of scratching the itch. Science fiction in the development of facing the dilemma of typing, has always been as a branch of literature, absorbed by the mainstream, but can not become the real mainstream, when people want to get interesting ideas, grand imagination of the future, people will read science fiction, but when people are eager for deep contemplation, hope that the author will respond to the meta-questions such as "who am I", "where do I come from", "where do I go", the first choice of literary readers will still be Lu Xun, Cao Xueqin, Chekhov, Kafka, Tolstoy, Writers like Dostoevsky who confront the essence of life, not science fiction.
Therefore, the re-proposed novel is actually in response to the genre crisis of science fiction, and even speculative fiction and suspense novels. It is assumed that the novel is a genre that can balance imagination and reality, and the author's imagination is no longer trapped in the vast stars, but can be like Kafka, imagining a living person one day becoming a beetle. The speculative novel focuses on the process of the author's reasoning and deduction, which encourages the author to provide his own worldview, create a logical and self-consistent virtual world in the text, and also face those things that are obvious in real life but cannot be discussed through fiction and imagination. The ark of imagination in literary history is also a refuge for memory, and it is assumed that the novel attaches importance to the combination of thinking experiments and realistic issues, thus solving the limitations of science fiction and other genres in responding to realistic issues.
Speculative fiction can be either Science Fiction such as Asimov and Ted Ginger, or Kafka's Metamorphosis, Echo's The Name of the Rose, or even Calvino's The Invisible City, Borges's The Garden of the Forked Paths, which Borges has been repeatedly discussed, and what is particularly inspiring in this genre is George Orwell's 1984, because it provides a virtual world with a serious political outlook and the logic of life, and in the fantasy reaches part of the truth of life. It makes the reader break into a cold sweat when reading it, not feeling that it is actually fictional, but a cold deduction of reality.
Speculative fiction is not only the art of storytelling, but also the development of our way of thinking, the boundaries of knowledge, and the development of thought. Today's readers lack interest in many novels, can not simply blame the level of readers, in fact, there are many high-level readers lurking, but most of the novels do not arouse their interest, they are silent. Most novels work hard, but they don't widen the boundaries, they just spin around in the traditions of their predecessors. When the literary world says that we want to return to realism, I am not satisfied, the key is not ism, but revolutionary exploration of boundaries.
In this regard, typical and well known to us is the novel writing of Ted Ginger. Ted Ginger argues, "All of the experiments on the mind and the exploration of philosophical questions in my work are exactly what science fiction does." His novels are typical speculative novels, based on creativity, rather than pure stories. Now that his practice has proven effective, must the narrative of a novel with the story as the core be an inverted law? I am afraid that there is no immutable only truth.
Further, the distinction between science fiction and pure literature is serious is questionable, and Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Don't Let Me Go" writes clones, so is he genre literature or serious literature? The use of suspense and science fiction techniques in novels to increase the creativity of novels is a common way of playing in the novel industry, but why are some people inherently classified as serious literature, and some writers are known for their genre and popularity, and banished to the edge of power discourse?
When I think about "speculative literature" with the help of biplateral novels, what I hope to break is also an unreflected serious-genre dichotomy, and the consequent prejudice against novelists. Just like Philip Dick writes science fiction, but it doesn't prevent him from thinking about serious questions, everyone loves Kafka, but isn't Metamorphometer a clever conjecture? Diptera is a rising star in the field of Chinese literature at present, in her and her contemporaries, including Chen Chuncheng, Shen Dacheng, Mu Ming, Kinte, Dome, Day Wen and other writers, are quietly diving in the deep sea of fantasy, occasionally diving out of the sea, giving people surprises, they broke the mainstream critics' judgment that the new voice writers "narrative homogenization, indulgence in personal experience", their novel skills have not been great, but in them, we can at least see the spark of insight in the wilderness.
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Luan Meng