Grandpa's great writer

Chapter 652 Misunderstanding
"A Clockwork Girl" was picked up by Zhang Zhong when he first arrived in New York. It took a while to transcribe it, and then took a while to change the characters.

The story of this book mainly takes place in Bangkok, which Zhang Zhong does not plan to modify, because this background has a great influence on the plot.

The author Paul Baccigalupi is an American, but he loves oriental culture and has a good understanding of Southeast Asia and China.

He majored in East Asian studies at university. After graduation, he lived in China and studied Chinese in Kunming and bj, so his works often have a strong oriental background.

And after Zhang Zhong made some revisions to this book, the oriental background was more solidified.

This book has a great reputation. Once it was published that year, it quickly won almost all fantasy literature awards including the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award.

Some people say that this book is a dystopian novel, but this is not accurate.

Dystopian novels mainly reflect that the proliferation of material civilization is higher than spiritual civilization, spiritual dependence is extremely controlled by material, and human spirit has no real freedom in a highly developed technological society.

This type of novels usually narrates the proliferation of human technology, which superficially improves human living standards, but essentially conceals a weak and empty spiritual world.

But "A Clockwork Girl" is different. The story takes place in the near future—a time background that is almost apocalyptic.

In the 23rd century, fossil energy is exhausted, and human beings have to use simple and crude bio-energy as power.Global warming has caused sea levels to rise, and a large number of coastal cities have been submerged.

GMOs are abused, mutated viruses ravage the human world, and species wither.

The trade between countries was cut off immediately, the gap between the rich and the poor widened infinitely, and the world's resources and financial resources were concentrated in the hands of a few grain companies with key genetic technologies.

Viewed against these backgrounds, the novel looks more like a post-apocalyptic novel, with a greater emphasis on anarchism and a chaotic social order.

The story happened in Thailand because of its remote geographical environment.

This humble small country was able to maintain its unique advantages in biological resources, and was lucky to escape the catastrophe of extinction.

The royal family and the government are still able to rule, and seem tough, against multinational corporations coveting local biological resources.

During the time period in which the story of the novel takes place, the government and the company, the company and the company, the national and the foreign refugee, and several parties barely formed a fragile balance.

But this balance was broken by the clockwork girl and a few unremarkable characters.

An interesting point in the narrative technique of this book is that it uses pov.

The so-called pov is a point of view, and translated into Chinese is the writing method of point of view characters. When describing the same thing, you can freely choose the most abundant perspective.

This method is not uncommon, and it appears in many works. On Earth, when many fantasy fans see pov, the first thing that comes to mind should be "A Song of Ice and Fire", because this book is an extreme use of pov. There are too many pov characters in it to count.And in "A Song of Ice and Fire", the name of each chapter is the name of a character, and this character is the point of view of this chapter.

In fact, "The Code of Shanghe Tu during Qingming Festival" is also an extreme pov novel.

It is not uncommon for pov to appear very early, but few works have used it so much in the past. (In fact, some pov is also mixed in the web texts now, similar to the transitions of movies. Readers generally won’t buy it if they use it too much.)
This writing technique tests the author's narrative skills on the one hand and the patience of the readers on the other.

In fact, although many povs are used in "The Code of Shanghe Tu on Qingming Festival", the stories described in the book can basically be explained in chapters and sections, and readers are not so tired to read.

But for a book like "A Clockwork Girl", there is only one story in the whole book, and some readers who are not impatient may feel that there are too many repetitions and redundant, and then lose the patience to continue reading.

Of course, the advantages of pov are also obvious. On the one hand, it increases the flexibility of the narrative, and on the other hand, it is very convenient for later modification and addition and deletion of plots.

If this method is used well, it can make readers have a strong sense of substitution, and it is easy to trigger the reader's brain to form a visual effect, because it itself is somewhat similar to the expression method of film and television dramas.

Moreover, this method is suitable for stories with many characters and magnificent scenes, such as "A Song of Ice and Fire" and "The Code of Shanghe Picture at Qingming Festival".

Secondly, this method can also describe a matter "fairly". The reason why it is said to be fair is that the perspective here is not the perspective of God given by the author, but the perspective of the parties, that is, the perspective of the viewpoint.

……

When the name "Wind-up Girl" came out, netizens started the program that they couldn't escape every time-guess the story through the title of the book.

[Need to say?Hearing the name, one knew it must be my major league custom novel. 】

[Upstairs, it’s shameless to lick the dog. Can your dog licking alliance ask Zhang to rewrite the custom novel? 】

[Ahem, I'm just joking. 】

[Haha, don't take it seriously, but when I saw the title of this novel, I really just played a clockwork. At that time, I thought I was hallucinating after playing too many games. 】

[Wind-up girl—— Orianna. 】

[The protagonist must be a robot, her whole body is covered with clockwork. When it's over, when she thinks of clockwork, the enchanting figure of Orianna pops up in her mind. 】

【me too. 】

【Clockwork: A device that drives a machine. It winds up a sheet of steel and uses its elasticity to gradually loosen it to generate power...】

This time the discussion is getting more and more crooked, and everyone is thinking of a game that is now very popular, the League of Dogs.

Some people even made a story cover and introduction, which spread on the Internet.

On the cover, is the appearance of the game character Orianna.Blue eyes, a steel body, and parts all over his body.

【Zhang Zhong's latest sci-fi masterpiece: A Clockwork Girl】

[Introduction: Orianna was once a curious girl with flesh and blood, but an accident in the lower regions of Zaun indirectly caused her to become seriously ill. Her deteriorating body must be replaced with sophisticated artificial organs, one by one, until There is no more human flesh in the whole body.She made herself a wondrous brass sphere that was both companion and bodyguard. 】

This is the simplest introduction, and someone directly moved Orianna's full backstory.

People who play games, when they see the cover and the introduction, they can recognize who it is at a glance, and they also know that it is funny.

But other people who don't play games were really taken aback when they saw this picture and profile at first glance.

For a while, some readers really thought that the protagonist of "The Clockwork Girl" was Orianna, a real Piltover girl.

(End of this chapter)