Overturned Tower

This is a very long testimonial, because there are many things I want to talk about seriously.

As you all know, when I write novels, I like to establish the theme of a story in advance. Like the theme of "The Overturned Tower", it is called "Hero".

This is not a description, but a discussion.

I have to correct a concept that may be misunderstood-I don't first think of a story, identify a protagonist, and summarize it under the word "hero". Instead, I first thought of this keyword, and then began to think about how to explain and discuss this word, and then construct a complete story from this.

This creative habit comes from the later stage of my creation of "Blood of Mercury".

At that time, I was deeply aware of my lack of ability. Not only the lack of creative ability, but also the lack of reading and knowledge.

Under the advice of a friend, I have developed a habit since my freshman year: study for two hours every day, and allow myself to acquire new knowledge.

Such learning has continued until now. Except when I am sick, and on the day when the new game I want to play is released-I will keep studying for more than two hours a day, and this habit has been going on for almost eight years now.

No matter what I am doing, the learning content of these two hours must have nothing to do with the work and learning tasks I am currently doing. For example, when I was in school, my "study time" may point to a movie, a novel, or a collection of poetry, but no matter what I am watching, the purpose is not "entertainment", but "learning".

When reading a novel, it is necessary to make reading notes. Record sentences, disassemble the outline, and make character cards. And when watching a movie, if I think the movie is good, I will try to make a beat table of the movie, discuss the specific meaning of the character or plot of a certain scene, find the driving force of a certain character, a certain plot rhythm and speed.

At that time, I deeply felt the lack of knowledge, so I helped my classmates take the Erya general education course for free - it was a kind of open online course that every student had to watch every semester. I learned a lot in this process, which has a considerable influence on my later creations.

And after I learned to a certain level, I started to use these two hours for writing training. The model I adopt is the "three-word training method", that is, open a book at random, turn over three pages, and construct a new story from the three words I saw at first sight in these three pages. Make the story as short as possible with those three words, have twists and turns, and be funny.

This kind of training lasted for about half a year, and it can be said to be very effective. After I finished "Blood of Mercury", the three books I wrote, with a combined content of 6 million words, all exceeded 10,000 average subscriptions. Among them, 4.5 million are original novels, and the book has been successfully completed.

And this kind of training mode makes me especially good at short story structure.

For example, the nightmare dungeon in "Player Super Justice"... In fact, all the nightmare dungeons of the player, including the "Gallery" dungeon, don't have any outline. It was an improvisation I made the night before after I settled on the name and the lead-in for the nightmare.

Including the pre-determined "theme" of each book, including the title of each volume of each book, the name of the nightmare, is a constraint I give myself. This kind of constraint can make my imagination more active.

And the motivation for creating "The Overturned Tower" also comes from this kind of day-to-day learning.

I saw a book at the time called Metamorphosis of Science Fiction: A Poetics and Genre History of Science Fiction. His author, Darko Suenwen, is the founder of the cognitive alienation theory of science fiction. I think this is the group of people with the highest level among contemporary science fiction literature researchers.

He proposed a theory, which is "cognitive alienation". Su Enwen's concept of alienation comes from Shklovsky and Brecht's "defamiliarization" theory, among which Brecht's "defamiliarization" is an upgrade of Shklowski's theory, while Su Enwen's theory is go one step further.

In this theory, the world shaped by science fiction is actually the alienation and defamiliarization of real life, and cognition of reality in a roundabout way.

Han Song, an excellent contemporary Chinese science fiction writer, once said that one of the significances of science fiction works is to give early warnings of threats that mankind may face in the future. Song Mingwei, a scholar of science fiction research, believes that the world shaped in science fiction is just the realization of a certain idea and thought in our hearts, and through the cognition of defamiliarization, we can in turn confirm something that we have turned a blind eye to. Criticize accordingly.

From this perspective, although science fiction is different from fables, the process of its cognition is realized through fables. One of my favorite sci-fi works, Teacher Liu Cixin's "Poetry Cloud", is an extremely allegorical and romantic sci-fi. The inner nature it highlights comes from this core.

Because of this, from "Dune", we can see the plunder and control of oil countries by big powers, rather than "the interstellar age full of superpowers and feudal countries"; from "King of Light", we can understand the importance of religion. The essence is just an absurd illusion, not just a "myth stitched with modern nouns"; what "Three-Body" discusses and criticizes is human morality itself, not "aliens with advanced technology invade the earth" simple story.

The essence of science fiction is not technological fantasy, but scientific fantasy. It is a fantasy literature with scientific thinking, under the cloak of science, it still has a soft humanistic core. In the final analysis, its essence is still fantasy literature.

The difference between science fiction and fantasy is that its core is human curiosity about the unknown and the scientific spirit of "if so, then what will happen". Rather than a cold pile of elements such as steel and computers, spaceships and aliens.

Arthur Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There is no doubt that modern technology has touched the edge.

It is becoming more and more difficult for people to understand the top science and technology. Some bloggers, some UP masters, and some professionals with explanatory skills are needed to make people understand as much as possible in a way that ordinary people can understand and with less rigorous metaphors. What the **** are they doing. The general public's understanding of a certain cutting-edge technology is usually abbreviated as "I don't understand, but it is useful/useless" after an explanation.

From this point of view, people who blindly worship technology are the people who have the least scientific thinking.

However, the rapid development of China's science and technology and the popularization of network knowledge have allowed the genre of imagination to break through—it is no longer a cliché topic such as "cosmic navigation", "discovering a new world", and "artificial intelligence", and readers' acceptance of science fiction is also increasing. widening.

But at the same time, with the popularization of science and technology, face recognition, Skynet positioning, scanning QR code or even scanning face shopping, drone delivery, automatic driving, smart home, Alpha Dog... many things that existed only in imagination before Everything has become a reality. It will also become difficult to carry out further science fiction creations within a recognizable and understandable range.

This is a challenge. It is not a challenge to contemporary science fiction authors, but a challenge to the entire category of science fiction.

Readers who are familiar with the sci-fi circle must know about the vigorous New Wave movement in the sci-fi world.

In my opinion, the existence of the New Wave movement itself is a kind of rebellion against the golden age of science fiction in 1940-science fiction should naturally have new categories, and with the development of the times, new categories should continue to appear.

Many sci-fi readers believe that there is a "master" in the category of sci-fi, and the orthodoxy is what they like to read and admire. But this kind of criticism is often a kind of meaningless criticism in order to maintain its own aesthetic status.

Category differentiation is undoubtedly conducive to the development of the industry. Science fiction literature is originally a kind of young literature, a literature full of young people's imagination. When it will be understood by young people as "an old thing", it is when its vitality begins to decline.

You can't enclose yourself, but ask for common ground while reserving differences. As Teacher Liu Cixin said, we need to broaden the scope of science fiction literature.

According to strict classification, "Tower of Overturning" should belong to "Kocchi", that is, science fiction works, and at the same time, it has some socialist blood. The core inspiration of this book comes from the popular board game rule "Shadow Run" in the 1990s, a very classic cyber fantasy rule. Of course, the specific settings are not the same, just a source of inspiration. I have sent the settings that can be disclosed in this book to the relevant works, and those who are interested can pick them up by themselves.

For example, many readers may not know that the inspiration for "Blood of Mercury" is actually the Aion... When I saw the hourglass-shaped world map, I thought this is so cool. Then rationalize it, and there will be the prototype of the "eggshell world", and all subsequent settings will be based on this.

As for the inspiration of "Player Super Justice", many people think it is a black contract, but I haven't actually watched that episode. Its real inspiration was a game called Soul Sacrifice.

The bearing and inheritance of the curse, the curse is power, the loss of control of desire, the duality of the hero who saves the world and the demon king who destroys the world, each other's exterior and interior, and the time loop that goes back and forth but can connect the entire story. This is the core of what I want to talk about in "The Player".

Another inspiration for this book is "Animal Rhapsody" and "Kit Kat Taxi". Some old board gamers may know that although Shadowrun is a cyber theme, it is a typical Western fantasy world of trolls, elves, and orcs. In order to maintain the gameplay, many things were not discussed. Because this rule is also a cognitive alienation from classic fantasy rules-such as DND and WOD.

At this time, "Animal Rhapsody" and "Kit Kat Taxi" gave me another inspiration: if you want to dig deeper into the core of humanity, then highlighting "humanity" itself is a correct strategy. Just as if you want sweetness, you need to add some salt. Naturally, the way to highlight human nature can also be done by strengthening the "beast nature".

I was still thinking about a very important question, that is, the core of the cyberpunk theme must be tragedy.

Space opera and cyberpunk can be said to run counter to each other. It can be said that if civilian manned spaceflight is developed first, the world will enter space opera; if virtual reality is developed first, the world will enter cyberpunk. And space opera is outward, conquering, positive, expansive, and romantic; cyberpunk is inward, introspective, and self-cancelling.

Of these two themes, one heralds "war and conquest" in geopolitics, and the other is "influence and rewriting" in ideology. This is the unavoidable normal state of the world that has emerged since the Cold War era.

Therefore, it can be said that cyberpunk is almost impossible not to be a tragedy. Even if the creation of themes in the system is completed and a happy ending is achieved—even if the Huangban Tower is blown up, so what?

There are still so many companies. People are still people like that.

On a larger scale, the bombed Arbanta may be a harbinger of resistance to the fire. It may signal the possibility of future change...but only possibility. Readers who have watched an excellent TV series like "Age of Awakening" may realize that the plot of Cyberpunk 2077 is closer to the end of "The Lost One" than the real "Awakened One" and "Tinder". A Strike" and "The Release and Satisfaction of Violent Desires".

There is always tragedy at the end of comedy. In a cyberpunk world, even if people get their senses, and by almost impossible means, they succeed in rebelling against the corporation - so what?

The fuse that induces the contradictions in the cyberpunk society is the limited resources and the expansion of the population.

With the further depletion of overall resources, the operation of the new allocation method will still lead to new turmoil.

If the ultimate problem of "resources" cannot be solved, if human beings cannot go out of the planet, then in the distant future, the very distant future, there will still be new tragedies that will inevitably come.

But the setting of "spiritual relatives" gave me another idea. A setting that can make a reasonable transition from "cyberpunk" to "space opera", a plot that can truly give people in the cyberpunk world "possibility"-let's not list it for now. When you finish this testimonial, you can turn back to this paragraph.

Of course, the tragic nature of the cyberpunk theme remains unchanged.

Because in that case, the essence of this book is actually no longer cyberpunk. So I call it "cyber fantasy" as a distinction.

The inspiration for the first volume of this book comes from a song by YOASOBI called "Ultramarine". The lyrics of this song, I think, are very suitable for Russell, so they are also very suitable as the theme of the prologue.

And the science popularization about the card "LL-Ensemble Blue Zhigeng" in Yu-Gi-Oh. When I was in color, I felt a considerable degree of shock.

This shock flowed out into words and became the main story of this volume.

Because I thought to myself, I have to shock you too. Think of it as a science popularization of useless bean knowledge.

As for the inspiration for the second volume, it is "Purple and Black" in the collection of fantasy short stories "Purple and Black" written by fantasy master K.J. Parker.

There is such a passage in it, let me repeat it roughly based on my impression: "Reserve the purple ink exclusively for the use of the emperor and officials, so that you can tell the authenticity of the documents you receive at a glance. This idea itself has no meaning. problem, but someone in the logistics department discovered that all officials can be effectively manipulated in this way—just don’t give enough purple ink to officials who don’t like them or who have different political opinions. They say that the quality of purple ink is not good enough, or The excuse that the ship transporting purple ink sank in the sea. In this case, they have the right to do nothing, because they cannot sign a legally binding document that is recognized by others—a document written in purple ink.”

Of course, this in itself has nothing to do with the story of the second volume. But this interesting concept gave me another inspiration... I will continue to retell it at the end of the second volume.

The testimonials at the end of each volume will describe the inspiration and creative thinking of this volume. As a discussion and sharing with everyone.

That's about it for the small talk.

I believe that there are very few readers who have the patience to see this.

But I am grateful to all the readers who can read it calmly. Since we can see this, it must be because we also have a resonance.

I sincerely say that I am working full-time and have a mortgage. As a fantasy author, I write such a subject across borders, a subject that is both sci-fi and unit drama, and a dual niche theme... If you say, It's not that there is some kind of ideal factor in it, so it must be that my brain is flooded.

I don't think it's shameful to show off your ideals, just like Zilu Mengniu. Now that Internet literature is commercialized, I still hope that the creators of Internet literature have literary ideals.

To put it bluntly... How many young people are still willing to engage in literary creation in modern times? Will they still survive? Are those engaged in this business young people with literary ideals, or are they depressed and rotten scholars?

When the literary masters of the previous generation abandon their pens due to aging, who should take over the future literature of this country?

How can something that even young people in this country are unwilling to watch become an international and historic classic of the times?

When I was young, I admired Liu Wenyang~www.wuxiahere.com~ and regretted his untimely death. The stories written by young creators are difficult for mature creators with life background to write, and they should be an indispensable part of the entire field of literary creation.

We should not separate Internet literature from literature, but we should not do nothing and let the vast majority of Internet literature directly become "historical" and "classic" ancient literature. It is falsely seeking to "de-entertain" Internet literature. This is the same folly as Uncle's "de-two-dimensionalization".

Compared with the works of more than ten or twenty years ago, "Lord of the Mysteries", "Sword of Dawn", "Long Night", "Death on Mars", "Afterglow" and other excellent online works of the new generation , has been able to take into account both literature and entertainment. Readers also prefer stories that touch people's hearts and have a complex humanistic core, which is an optimization of the market.

This must be a process of gradual change and gradual evolution.

Its end will not be in the hands of the previous generation of authors, nor will it be in the hands of my generation. It keeps getting better, and we're on the way.

With the development of Internet literature, classics such as "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" will be born from Internet literature one day. And all we can do is to construct such soil and wait for such flowers to bloom.

My creative strength is far from being comparable to the above-mentioned excellent authors, so I have to boldly show off my ideals here-but then again, having ideals to show off is better than having nothing to say and no dreams to sell.

Tomorrow will be on the shelves, at least updates of more than 4,000 words!

I hope everyone can make a first order and support Amao.

Hope we can see you tomorrow.

—May you always be happy.