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by fatman13gg
3588 days ago
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Okay. I just finished reading the whole thing. Still a lot of the things don't add up. A lot of the things don't feel right. I can't put it into exact word. But in the link provided by rabboRubble (https://read.douban.com/reader/ebook/20769128/), it seems that most reasonable Chinese sci-fi readers think the story is lame if you read the top review. And that's about how I feel. --Spoiler Alert-- The whole story actually doesn't seem to have anything to do with sci-fi at all. The plot is evolving around a man delivering letter? What? Is it in Victorian or is it in the future? All sci-fi elements are just stuffed in there and has no actual meat. I think for a good sci-fi, the author should first think through what technology exists in that world and then develop story that is confined to the setting. Not like this story which sci-fi only served as some convenient facts for author to exploit reader's emotion. Edit. And wow... thanks for all the down votes, guys. Hope all you've down voted read the whole folding BJ already. |
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This may be why:
First you described a defect in the story. But you claim such defects have "always been a problem" in science fiction. So this story is unsatisfying to you in company with a slew of other works, many of which will have been award winners.
Then you speculated that this particular story might have won an award only because it was Chinese, as if the other finalists are likely to have been better. Yet you've made it clear that you wouldn't expect them to be. So your initial criticism, that the story falls short as so much of science fiction does, gives way to a criticism of this peculiar story--but you have only singled it out for being written by a Chinese author. So, it is ordinarily bad, yes; but it is particularly bad for being Chinese.
I do not think you meant it like that, but that is certainly how you wrote it.
As for the premise of this and similar stories: It is commonly held that technological advancement disproportionately benefits the ruling classes, while the workers are made to grind away as usual, life having been little altered. This line of thought may vary in intensity and nuance with place and regime. "Folding Beijing" and many stories like it draw up a simplified world--all fictive worlds are simplified--in which this tenet rings particularly true. Probably the author intends to play with a view on our world as it is, or that part of it which she is most concerned with. Certainly she wants to lay hold of a reader's emotion, to keep them reading (we do not all share your desires in speculative fiction): who does not care about what their own lot may become, or the lots of their neighbors? We may even feel this way when our lots are presented figuratively, as in a world that looks a little too close to our own for being so different--or a little too different for being so clearly our own. Many of us are weak for this sort of thing. But I think it's disingenuous to claim that such a story only does this. It may not serve the function you want it to; but then, if you're used to that in science fiction, you should be expecting it any time you see the label.
(If you want to know, I personally thought this one dull, but I feel that way about a lot of science fiction, too.)