[Book Review] Many invisible things disappeared at once: Gong Wanhui's "Artificial Girl"

Recommended index: ★★★★☆

Readability Index: ★★★☆☆

Interest Index: ★★★★☆

Freshness Index: ★★★★★

Author: Gong Wanhui

Publisher: Aquarius Culture

Publication date: 2022/06

foreword

Just seeing the title of the book "Artificial Girl" makes people unconsciously think about "AI" or some kind of technological biochemical person.

But after careful reading, I found that these words are not enough to explain the main point of this book. The so-called "artificial girl" can refer to a "robot", a "virtual character" or a "non-natural girl". They have more or less the meaning of "added", but what is added, you need to find the answer from the book.

Incoherent escape trip

The story begins with the escape, from the father taking the narrator "I" to escape from the home to the narrator "I" taking the virtual daughter "Lilika" to find the home. Every journey is almost broken, like walking into a section. The journey of memory is full of uncertainty along the way, and we can only keep walking, keep walking, and go to a distance that no one knows about.

The escape route actually follows the flow of memory in the brain. So every time you open a memory room, you will enter a magical dream. Some of the dreams are fictional stories mixed with reality, and some are real stories that seem to be fictional. But the truth is not the focus of the story. Even if the details of the memory are filled everywhere, it is not necessarily that the memory is 100% full of truth.

The real and the fake, the reality and the unreal are just a thin line, wandering among them may be the only way to find the time to escape from reality, where you can think about how to restart the next journey of your life.

Doomsday prophecy

But before the moment when life is restarted, life is still full of misery. It's like the narrator "I" in the story is always looking forward to the end. Maybe it's because I want to add a peculiar color to my boring life, or maybe I'm really tired of the pendulum-like lifeless days. But like all the doomsday prophecies that have ever appeared in this world, it never really came. The end of the world did not come, and the days went on as usual.

"I" was still talking to the virtual daughter, no matter how much she listened. Anyway, her existence is like a doomsday prophecy, there are true and false, just believe whichever side you want to believe.

Just like we always love to indulge in the virtual world, we know that the self in that world is not real, but we are still immersed in the achievements of unlocking various tasks for a long time.

Whether it is true or false, many things that we can't see will actually disappear all at once. Why spend so much time trying to figure out who's real and who's fake?

Epilogue

What impressed me most about this book was the author's skill in using words. The kind of description that is full of stickiness and detail makes people unconsciously fall into the situation he describes. For example, what is the decay of the old house, what does the doomsday city look like, how the cat dreams with its whole body...etc. He is quite skilled in controlling language and plot, full of magic.

The second most impressive thing is the suffocating sense of apocalypse in the story. Almost every chapter is filled with a unique smell of death, the possibility of death is human, spiritual, pet or tamagoy. In fact, everything is unavoidable and mortal, and what they try to leave before death is precisely the desire for "life". This is also the most ingenious part of the design in the book, to understand the taste of being alive with a posture of facing death, or to start talking about birth from destruction.

When you think about it carefully, such an arrangement is actually philosophical. Many things in life can only see the positive meaning through the negative.

Unexpectedly, at the end of the novel, the feeling of doomsday suddenly makes people want to spend every day with a positive attitude. This can be regarded as a strange harvest.

The above is the essence of this book and my feedback after reading it. If you have read this book, please leave a message to communicate with me.