Liu wrote a better novella than Beijing Folding?

The award-winning effect of the science fiction novella Beijing Folding should make it have more and wider readers, just like Three-body.

In my opinion, Beijing folding is not bad, but it is not good enough to reach the excellent level in my mind. As for why, I'll talk about it later.

The story takes place in Beijing, a folding city with strict class differentiation. There are three floors, and the elite is located on the first floor, with 5 million people staying for 24 hours at a time. There are 25 million people living on the second floor, each time they live 16 hours; There are 50 million people living on the third floor, and their survival time is only eight hours. In other words, people in the third space will have 40 hours of sleep every time, so much time is forcibly wasted! In the same Beijing, the three spaces are staggered in time and rarely intersect, and they change in different spaces every time they arrive at a fixed time.

Lao Dao, a garbage disposal worker in the third space, risked being caught and sneaked into the first space to help deliver a letter to a girl he loved in the first space. But the girl actually married someone old enough for her father.

The author uses a person in the third space to travel in the form of "Grandma Liu enters the Grand View Garden" to write about the huge gap of three floors and the helplessness of the people at the bottom.

In fact, it is not difficult to see that the innuendo in Beijing Folding mostly shows the huge gap between the first space and the third space, the heavy burden of higher education funds at the bottom, and the efforts made by the rich woman to solve the ubiquitous empty life. These realities all happen in today's society.

Why didn't I say it was good enough? Just because it looks too realistic, if we just abstract the reality and put on a coat, we will lose the strangeness of literature, but I don't mean that literature is not real to read, but we should go beyond reality.

Of course, there are also some touching places in it. Lao Dao is a garbage disposal worker. When he heard the discussion in the first world about whether to use automatic garbage disposal, it would be cheaper and more reliable if it was handled automatically by machines. However, where have these tens of millions of garbage workers gone? From this point of view, the work of garbage workers is more like the pity of the elites in the third space, and Lao Dao is also lost in thought. This once happened in China. After the reform and opening up, a large number of workers were laid off. In many places, there are some unnecessary jobs, such as pressing the elevator, just to let people have work to do.

But what is even more frightening is the person born in the third space. Their minds are completely bound here, and they hardly know what other possibilities there are in life. They don't like being garbage workers, but all they can and want to do is to express themselves in the ballroom in the third space, hoping to find a job as a record player or dancer.

In a word, this is a poor but not amazing work. Class division is a common starting point of right and wrong in science fiction, but some people write epics, while others only write mediocre works.

"Beijing Folding" writes the reality into the future, which has a ridiculous sense of steampunk. The future is more than just a copy of the present. If you write the future completely with the present reality without any transcendence, it will never become a refreshing science fiction. However, the author claims that the Beijing Fold she sees now is only the beginning of her novel, and she doesn't know what she will write in the future.

While watching Beijing Folding, I thought of another book and a novella.

Is the book my life at the bottom, or is it a documentary book written by Barbara? Allen Rick sneaked into the bottom, doing the most humble work to support himself, and found that the basic wage workers at the bottom could almost never become middle class. They work most of the time every day and have no time or consciousness to study in order to get a better position. On the one hand, hard work can't make you rich, but it covers all other possibilities. On the other hand, people at the bottom can't continue as long as they stop working. This is a cycle, and it is difficult to jump out.

The novella that reminds me of is Liu's Supporting Humanity, which also talks about class differentiation, but I think the vision and brushwork are much better than Beijing Folding. What is important is that Liu did not stay in the naked reality, but wrote more impactful words through brain holes.

A killer took a business, targeting three vagrants, and entrusted the business to the richest people in the world, who claimed to be members of the social wealth liquefaction Committee. This opening is enough to give you an appetite. Of course, we will make it clear step by step later.

It turns out that a group of aliens, as "gods", once created several earths, all within 200 light years of the earth, and this time it was another planet in the novel that called the earth brothers and invaded the earth. They want to use Australia as a reserve to feed all the people on the earth, and the standard of feeding is the lowest living standard of human beings today.

So the rich will panic and try their best to improve the minimum living standard of mankind. Liquefaction of property is the way to realize it. Property will be distributed equally to all people on the earth, ensuring that the average living standard of human beings will not be too bad when they are supported.

As the target of being killed, vagrants are people who are extremely hostile to the rich and do not accept the liquefaction of wealth. They affected the liquefaction of wealth, so the rich hired people to kill them.

But the story hasn't got to the point yet. Why did my brother planet invade the earth? This is Liu's more shocking idea. Brother planet is a planet whose basic constitutional principle is "inviolability of private property", and it has established the principle of social machine protection all over the world. If there is any violation of private property, the social machine will enforce the law.

Although there is a gap between the rich and the poor, it is not too big. Until later, on my brother's planet, "knowledge" suddenly changed and could be sold as a commodity. By buying expensive knowledge, the rich can instantly have knowledge that ordinary people can't learn for a lifetime. Moreover, in aesthetics and philosophy, the gap between the upper class and ordinary people is getting bigger and bigger. Until later, ordinary people could not understand everything in the upper class, and almost became two species.

Then, the following scene appeared.

They came to the earth by the ultimate producer, because the whole planet belongs to him alone. For the ultimate producer, at the same time, in the face of billions of people on earth who can no longer be regarded as the same species, sympathy and pity are ridiculous words.