Hospital: 1

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Berry has a massive list of works, accolades, and accomplishments, including translations of literature. “I am also the author or editor of more than ten books on Chinese literature, film and culture,” such as a collection of interviews with “pioneer of Chinese queer cinema, Cui Zi’en...” He is also a contributor to ChinaFile and his essays in Chinese have appeared in the weekly Friday supplement of The Beijing News. In 2021 Berry was given the Cultural Exchange Award by the Taiwan Ministry of Culture, and he is a Two-time Translation Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); he has even sat on the jury of the Golden Horse Film Festival twice, first at the invitation of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and then at the invitation of Ang Lee. “As the single most prestigious film festival in the Chinese-speaking world, the Golden Horse is often considered to the ‘Chinese Academy Awards.’”

For example, overnight we found ourselves living in a world made up of masks, having to constantly undergo nucleic acid tests, and everyone being treated as a potential patient. Ten years ago, in my science fiction novel Hospital , I wrote, "Not only has our city become a hospital, but the whole world has become a hospital.""What kind of world would it be if one day we were treated as patients no matter what we were doing?" This scene seems to be becoming a reality. The fifth aspect is transience. On the one hand, it appears that immortality is within reach, but on the other hand, the lifespan of many things seems to be getting shorter and shorter. This trend applies to everything from perfect celebrity personas to large-scale technology or real estate enterprises, from single technologies to entire industries, and even to civilizations. In He Xi's science fiction novel 《异域》, everything is in fast-forward mode, creating new things while also producing monsters. The biggest challenge for technology is its short-livedness, and sometimes it is more important to take care of the aftereffects than to create new things. The Metaverse is more like Rome, where eternal life is just a delusion. As the Metaverse arrives, its replacement is already brewing on the horizon. People who may not take sci-fi seriously as a genre and need to see that it’s not all just laser blasters and lightsabers;

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Demented, delirious, and one of a kind…Kafkaesque doesn’t begin to describe this cunning labyrinth of a novel. Nothing I have read has captured so incisively (and searingly) the unrelenting institutional brutality of our contemporary world.” —Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The same problem will arise in all areas related to intelligent machines, from drones to medical equipment. In this new era of survival where machines are progressively resembling humans, and humans are becoming more like machines, “benevolence” entails staying humble and alert in all circumstances. Can you tell us a bit about how this book first came to you? What about its initial presentation first piqued your interest?Among the discoveries of this new time: "there are Buddhas all over the universe", and while he's not expected to make a return trip to Earth -- once was enough -- mankind has sent out ships and probes to possibly seek him out elsewhere, with Mars a promising candidate. I think the biggest change is that the world is becoming more and more difficult to understand. Therefore, my works are more and more obscure and difficult to understand. Even as he is told: "you need to submit to the hospital", Yang can't get fully on board -- not least because he remains baffled by what the hospital (and his situation -- "But all I did was drink a bottle of mineral water !") are.

Hospital and illness are perfect metaphors for this message, since even in the West, trust in doctors and modern medicine is a given, with only conspiracy theorists (given an impulse by the recent pandemic) questioning the system. This means it took me a while too before I definitely decided that Yang Wei was being taken by the nose. Who are some of the most exciting or interesting science fiction writers working today, in your opinion, and what excites you about what they are doing? He has help navigating the bureaucracy and begins undergoing a battery of tests, but mostly remains in the dark about everything, from his own condition to the functioning of the hospital. Yang is kept in the dark -- and the darkness around him turns out to be more far-reaching, indeed all-consuming, than he could have initially imagined.This actually doesn’t require any special skills; I simply need to record what I see like writing a diary. The universe is already there waiting for us, it is what it is. One just needs a little courage to speak out and put it on paper. The novel also discusses the philosophical implication of chronic pain, and connects it from a personal level to the cosmic level, with an extended dense section of the novel discussing a hospital and diseased-based cosmology that connects the Buddhist concept of perpetual and inescapable suffering, medical treatments that seem to prolong not cure ailments, to movements of the stars and galaxies in the universe. Therefore, sometimes I feel like I am living in a future world, where things that should happen tomorrow are happening tonight.

Indeed: "Disease is the default setting for everything, the normal state of things" (or, as it's then put for even greater emphasis: "No one escapes the law: Disease is the Default Setting for Everything"). The expressive chapter headings help -- 'Death Is The End, But The End Is Only The Beginning', or 'How Do You Know That Your Brain Isn't There Simply To Produce Shit' -- but Hospital is far less about action than ideas, and some patience is required as Han slowly builds them up.

Advance Praise

Exorcism, original title 驱魔 (Pinyin qūmó), published in Chinese in May of 2017, planned to be published in English on November 28 of 2023