Chapter 2 sequence

Wang Jinkang is a famous science fiction writer of the new generation in China who is as famous as Liu Cixin.However, his main energy lies in short stories. Since the 1990s, he has published 80 short stories. His short science fiction novels have won more than ten Galaxy Awards, and he is the writer who has won the most Galaxy Awards in China.In recent years, his works have undergone a transformation, and he has changed to feature length novels, such as "Ant Life", which are all relatively excellent works.It is his latest masterpiece.If you use the simplest words to sum up this novel, it is: philosophy · suspense · subversion.

God is with me The title of this new work comes from the words of the Bible.God appears in the novel—and an alien at that.Humans have been discussing the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations for a long time (the ancient Greek philosophers considered it), but since no example has been found so far, a "Fermi paradox" has emerged as a result: "If alien civilizations exist, they should have appeared." There are many explanations for this paradox, among which JA Ball's explanation is that the earth is a cosmic zoo specially kept by advanced alien civilizations.In order to ensure that human beings can evolve spontaneously without interference, advanced civilizations try to avoid contact with human beings, and just watch silently in the universe.

In the book, an observer and administrator is set up for this "zoo", that is, God in the eyes of human beings.A similar story frame also has heralds in Western and Chinese science fiction works.For example, the movie "Mission to Mars" (Mission to Mars, 2000): highly civilized Martian organisms have migrated to a distant galaxy as a whole.Before leaving, he planted life on the earth, and left one person on Mars, waiting for the moment when the earth civilization develops to land on Mars.He waited hundreds of millions of years for this.More famous novels such as 2001: Space Odyssey (2001: Space Odyssey) also narrate a similar storyline (but it is not in Kubrick's film of the same name).Another example is that in Ni Kuang's "Wesley" series of science fiction novels, God is imagined as an alien, which can be said to be the novel version of "Zoo Hypothesis".

But as far as Wang Jinkang's original intention is concerned, the God he described is actually a subversion of "God".It is no longer a Western, religious God. Wang Jinkang intends to secularize, rationalize, and even Orientalize God.This oriental god has compassion and is quite good at playing necessary tricks and tricks.He is tired of the people who are evil in nature, and he will never change his love for licking the calf.In the first half of the novel, with wave after wave of suspense, the identity of "God" is always confusing, and there are constant shocks and ambiguities.When the long-awaited answer is revealed, readers may be disappointed with his secular identity, but this is exactly the author's intention - to return "creation" and "creation of man" from mythology to scientific rationality.And with the wise eyes of a rational observer, observe the overall human nature of human beings in the long history of 100,000 years.

good and evil are with me In the novel, the author always reminds readers to think about the following questions: What is good and evil?Are people inherently good or are they inherently evil?Can the flower of good grow from the dunghill of evil? We might as well compare it with Liu Cixin's. It emphasizes that "human nature is inherently evil", and any means are moral in order to survive.Therefore, the few remaining spaceships of human beings did not hesitate to launch the "Dark War" against each other. The crew of the "Bronze Age" could eat the dead bodies of the crew of the "Quantum" without any psychological barriers. If the eater is an acquaintance, he will say hello by the way.It can be said that Liu's universe is absolutely "zero moral".

The human beings in the book were also once zero moral.The ancestors of mankind killed each other, launched genocide wars, and ate the flesh of their own kind. They used such evil means to carve a bloody path in the early human jungle world.All those who survive today are descendants of bloodthirsty and cannibals.This is the original sin of mankind.What is even more unacceptable to the world is that there is no good judge in heaven who punishes evil and promotes good, and there is no heavenly rule such as "Heaven rewards good" or "Good and evil are rewarded".The novel also "unpredictably" depicts the tragic male war between chimpanzees, so as to prove that the "evilness" of human beings is deeply rooted in their animal nature, which simply proves the evilness of human beings to the point of death.

Liu Cixin's "zero morality" picture is all fictional, and it is an extreme environment deliberately set up by the author.The reader may or may not believe these pictures.In fact, most readers believe in the novel environment, but not in real life.But the "zero morality" picture described by Wang Jinkang is not fiction at all, but an accurate extraction of historical facts.These are the evils of the human group, and the evil of the group is often closely related to the survival of the group, and thus conforms to the highest morality of creatures.Although readers will have psychological resistance to these sharp conclusions, you cannot refute them and believe them.

Fortunately, however, the "zero morality" world described by Wang Jinkang only existed "once" in human history.Although human nature is inherently evil, in the process of group evolution, there is also a seedling of symbiotic altruism growing up with difficulty, and there is a tendency to catch up from behind.This is also the truth accurately extracted from history.At this point, readers can breathe a sigh of relief. We will no longer suffer from psychological blindness to the evil that is full of human history, nor will we be blinded by the evil that is full of light. But then again, even if human history has developed to such a high degree of civilization today, "goodness" is still not the most fundamental attribute of human beings. Human love, humanitarianism, world harmony, peace and anti-war, etc. are far from becoming human beings Universal Value.For this reason, the author puts forward his unique concept of symbiosis circle:

The group morality of creatures is kindness, altruism and harmony within the symbiosis circle, and evil, self-interest and competition outside the symbiosis circle. Different ethnic groups can form a "symbiosis circle" under necessary conditions (close civilization, common external pressure, etc.), but it is not as warm and affectionate as "Brothers Kong and Huai are united in the same spirit", because "symbiosis is magnified private , is the evil that unites”—this kind of explanation is more like another Chinese idiom, “the same evil helps each other”.When two ethnic groups meet in the sky and earth, competing for limited survival resources, and the two sides are in a "zero-sum game", my good is the other's evil, so "the most important thing for herdsmen is: to determine where the boundary line of the symbiosis circle is drawn ".Such thinking even has some practical significance.

There is no simple standard of good and evil Just like Wang Jinkang's consistent style, he integrates philosophical thinking into specific plots, characters, and suspense, and incorporates it into the framework of an interstellar war, allowing the story to gradually develop with internal logic, forcing readers and the author himself into a corner——have to accept the book. drawn conclusions. The first protagonist of the novel, Jiang Yuanshan, is by no means a perfect character of "Gao Quanquan".There is evil in his nature, showing original sin in childhood.And his wife Yan Xiaochen is the embodiment of truth, goodness and beauty. While she loves her husband deeply, she always keeps her third eye open to the evil in his nature.After the ancestors saved the human race, Jiang Yuanshan decided to kidnap the ancestors and colonize the ancestors' mother planet for the best benefit of the human beings on the earth. In the end, he was overthrown by the angry people led by his wife and put into God's prison.Yan Xiaochen righteously reprimanded Jiang Yuanshan for being "ungrateful": "No matter how the core interests are, human beings cannot be turned into beasts again."

Should the story end here perfectly?But the author subverted the readers' psychological stereotypes—subsequent events proved that it was Yan Xiaochen's kindness that almost harmed mankind, while Jiang Yuanshan was always sober to the enemy's evil because of the evil in his nature, and thus contributed to the fate of mankind turnaround. At the end of the novel, Yan Xiaochen’s suicide note to her husband contains such bitter laments: You know I've always been an atheist, but at the moment I'd rather believe that there's a heaven in heaven, and there's a God in heaven. ... He is clear about rewards and punishments, never pushes the punishment of this life to the illusory afterlife, and never admits the fait accompli caused by evil.In that paradise, good people are truly rewarded, and evil people have no place to stay.Brother Niu Niu, is there such a paradise in the vast universe?If I can find it, I will wait for you there. However—she—and of course the readers, the belief that "Heaven rewards the good" that they once believed in has finally been shattered in the novel.The author reveals to us the complex and profound issues of good and evil.His thinking on this is a step deeper than his predecessors. May 21, 2011 Department of History of Science, Shanghai Jiaotong University