Why did Folding Beijing win the Hugo Award despite the scarcity of technological elements?

Yesterday, there were many topics about women. In addition to the women's volleyball team winning the Olympic championship, a Chinese female writer also won the highest honor in the industry. On the 21st, Hao Jingfang , a science fiction writer born in the 1980s, won the Hugo Award , the highest honor in the science fiction world, for her work "Folding Beijing" . This is the second time that a Chinese science fiction writer has won this honor after Liu Cixin won the Hugo Award for "The Three-Body Problem" in 2015 .

The difficulty for Hao Jingfang to win the Hugo Award is no less than that for the Chinese women's volleyball team to defeat Brazil and the Netherlands. You should know that in the short story competition unit of this year's Hugo Award, the main competitor of "Folding Beijing" is "Obituary" by the master writer Stephen King.

After winning the award, unlike previous nationwide celebrations after domestic writers won international awards, domestic science fiction fans had mixed attitudes towards this work, with many even believing that Folding Beijing could not be called a science fiction work.

So does the novella "Folding Beijing" contain science fiction elements?

Is it a satire disguised as science fiction?

In fact, "Folding Beijing" tells a very simple story. "The folding city is divided into three layers of space. One side of the earth is the first space, with a population of five million, and the living time is from six in the morning to six in the morning of the next day. The space is dormant, and the earth flips over. The other side after the flip is the second space and the third space. Twenty-five million people live in the second space, from six in the morning to ten at night the next day, and fifty million people live in the third space, from ten at night to six in the morning, and then return to the first space. Time has been carefully planned and optimally allocated, and carefully isolated. Five million people enjoy twenty-four hours, and seventy-five million people enjoy another twenty-four hours." In this folding world, Hao Jingfang describes to readers the fate of several small characters.

From the perspective of story structure, its plot is very simple. Compared with hard science fiction such as Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem", the "gentle" "Folding Beijing" is more like a critical literature that exposes current social contradictions.

In terms of science fiction, "Folding Beijing" does not involve gravitational waves, quantum mechanics, high-dimensional space, grand unified theory, god-level civilization, or the ultimate fate of the universe. The only science fiction part is space reversal and various robots that play social roles.

Netizens complained that if there is no wild imagination, what is the difference between science fiction works and computer game scripts?

Even the author himself has doubts about his work. Hao Jingfang said that her novel should be called "genreless literature", which is a vague literary form - it cares about the real space, but expresses it through the virtual space, telling things closely related to reality with factors that do not exist in reality. This kind of novel can be called a virtual reality novel, which is somewhat similar to the currently popular virtual reality (VR).

The author's own explanation does make "Folding Beijing" related to the popular VR, but to be honest, I think this kind of VR is not in the same league as Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Game.

As a science fiction work, is "Folding Beijing" really that bad?

Today, the world is changing at a rapid pace and is dizzying. Science fiction is the most imaginative deduction of the cutting-edge of science and technology and potential changes in the future. The aesthetics pursued by science fiction is the poetry of the cosmic dimension and a civilizational proposition faced by all mankind.

But some people also believe that science fiction has never been responsible for predicting the future or popularizing science, and it has never guaranteed that technology will be realized.

Folding Beijing belongs to the latter category, which may be related to the author Hao Jingfang's background. As a female writer, she pays more attention to the humanity behind science fiction and the exploration of social issues. According to Hao Jingfang, one of the inspirations for her to write Folding Beijing is her speculation on the future trend: "It is very likely that human labor will be internet-based. In the future, people may no longer be bound by their workplace or place of residence. Everyone will have three or four jobs and do different things with different people on the Internet. This is the real liberation of labor."

Regarding the fact that "Folding Beijing" is popular both inside and outside the country, Hao Jingfang believes that foreign readers' focus on "Folding Beijing" is different from that of Chinese readers. Chinese readers are mostly concerned about the existence of social classes and privileges reflected in the work, as well as the particularity of Beijing, while foreign readers are more concerned about the image of mechanization and automation on people. The robots of the future will replace the current workers, and a large number of low-level workers will be unemployed, becoming an unstable factor in the world.

This is also the reason why "Folding Beijing" won the science fiction award. Like "The Hunger Games", "Snowpiercer" and "The Expanse", it describes a series of issues in the future world, such as technology, economy, resources, society, class, work, survival, etc., which are extremely entangled.

Let’s read a short passage about the “future vision” in “Folding Beijing”:

"Let's talk about unemployment. You must understand this." Lao Ge continued, "Labor costs are rising, and machine costs are falling. At a certain point, machines are cheap. Once productivity is transformed and upgraded, GDP goes up, and unemployment goes up. What should we do? Policy protection? Welfare? The more protection there is, the less people the factory will hire. If you go outside the city now, there are few people in the factory area within a few kilometers. Isn't it the same for farms? Large farms have thousands of acres of land, and they are fully equipped for farming. They don't need many people at all. How did we do it in Europe and the United States at that time? Wasn't it done on a large scale like this? But the problem is that the land has been vacated and the people have been saved, so what are these people going to do? Europe is forcibly reducing the working hours of each person and increasing employment opportunities, but do you understand that this is not dynamic? The best way is to completely reduce the living time of some people and then find them work. Do you understand? It means stuffing them into the night. This has another advantage, that is, every time inflation is almost never transmitted to the bottom, the printing and spending of money are absorbed by those who can borrow money. GDP rises, but prices at the bottom do not rise. People don't know at all."

After the explosion of technology and information, will there be a backlash of alienation or will humans choose to compromise and find a new balance? We always have feelings of love and fear towards technology and the future, and these can only be released in literary works. Who stipulates that science fiction must be separated from reality?

Hao Jingfang does not want the novel Folding Beijing to become a reality. "I proposed a possibility for the future, facing problems such as automation, technological progress, unemployment, and economic stagnation. At the same time, I also proposed a solution, which is a little dark and obviously not the best result, but not the worst either: people did not starve to death, and young people were not sent to the battlefield in large numbers, as often happens in reality. I personally do not want my novel to come true , and I sincerely hope that the future will be brighter."

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.