World of Wonders 3

Several days passed in this way. Every day readers came from Beijing, and the editorial department was hurting and happy at once. China Youth Daily's second advertisement had also run. This one quoted a passage from Five Phoenixes Facing the Sun Saber, then broke off again at the crucial moment, to send everyone off to buy the magazine. To say nothing of anywhere else, in the Beijing area alone World of Wonders quickly became popular. The editorial department had not yet had a telephone installed. Salesmen from the bookstores kept hurrying over, or else they prevailed on Chen Jianjun. Chen Jianjun came eight times a day, every trip an additional order from a bookstore. Another week passed, and Hebei, Tianjin, Shanxi, and places like them had responded as well. ………… In Yi County, Hebei, there is a Langya Mountain—the very Langya Mountain of the Five Heroes of Langya Mountain. A unit was garrisoned in the mountain gullies. Twenty-seven-year-old Mo Sang—pah, Mo Yan—was a soldier there. His original surname was Guan. That day he and his comrades asked for leave to go into town and came to Baoding. Spring Festival was nearly here, and they all wanted to buy a few things. They wandered a circuit and saw a Xinhua Bookstore. His comrades weren't interested. He went in alone to look around. Last year he had already published his first work, Drizzle on a Spring Night, the story of a young woman not long married who longed for her husband, a soldier far away on an island. He had taken a manuscript fee of seventy-two yuan, bought a bottle of Liu Ling's Brew and four Ma Family Roast Chickens, and treated his comrades to a meal... So he took himself for a writer. The hottest thing in the bookstore was of course World of Wonders. The army did not allow private subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals; they were all ordered collectively. He picked it up at random and flipped through, skipped straight past the wuxia, glanced at The Puppet Masters and I, Robot without interest, and lingered only a moment on Journey to the Center of the Earth. Then he put it back. "Too lowbrow! Introducing more Western fiction is well and good, but everything this magazine introduces is science fiction. What's there to read in science fiction? It will never make the halls of high taste..." He shook his head, and in the end picked out a few books, planning to mail them ahead to his old home in Shandong and go back for a visit at Spring Festival. ………… Shanxi. Yangquan. Nineteen-year-old Da Liu had been admitted the year before to the North China Institute of Water Conservancy and Hydropower, and was already a clear-eyed, foolish college student—a 'university monk.' In 1985 he would graduate and be assigned to the Niangziguan Power Plant in Shanxi, and after that, everyone knows. It was winter break. He had eaten and drunk his fill, and lay on his little bed with one leg cocked, reading in smug contentment. Several magazines sat beside him. Suddenly his leg stopped jittering. After a while he made himself sit up. A long moment later he closed the book and sank into thought, then couldn't help praising it aloud. "Holy shit, this is written so fucking well!" What he was reading was The Puppet Masters, by the American writer Robert Heinlein. It told of the distant future, in 2007—yes, that's right, 2007—when a kind of monster came from outer space, called slugs. Their means of invading Earth were most unusual. They started no war and carried out no slaughter or destruction. They could parasitize humans by clinging to their backs and directly control the human mind. The protagonists did everything they could to make the United States government believe their judgment, so the whole nation might be mobilized to resist the slug invasion... What made this story a classic was the concept of alien parasitism. Cunningly, and without a sound, they slipped into human society, controlled human thought, and made people become their slaves of their own free will. This premise was later used in countless works. Da Liu had first encountered science fiction in high school and took to it at once. At this moment he was beside himself over The Puppet Masters. "This magazine's pretty good. Is there a way to subscribe... Huh? There really is. And there's a prize draw?" He sat down at his desk at once, filled out a questionnaire, and prepared to mail it to the editorial department. He had always wanted to write something himself, but he didn't know where to begin, and could only press down the restless urge inside him. Incidentally: As for Da Liu himself, I won't discuss him, because I don't know him. But the ideas in some of his works are very red. Most interesting of all, later generations had a claim: the reason Three-Body 1 could win the Hugo Award was that opening stretch of plot. Foreigners took one look—aiyo, writing about that, that's scar literature for sure! It turned out not to be so. ………… Ten days before Spring Festival. It was the coldest time. The north wind raged and blew until a person's mouth hurt. The cold weather stood in sharp contrast to the festive air of the streets welcoming the New Year. Chen Qi, high-ranking cadre that he was, rode a bicycle himself out of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office compound. He had just paid a call on Liao Gong, presented the inaugural issue of World of Wonders, chatted a little, and was heading to the Ministry of Culture to deliver another copy. This, too, was a way of making himself look good. Coming out of the Ministry of Culture, on the way back to Lechunfang, he bought some stove candy and things to eat. "A little to the left—to the left!" "All right, don't move. Just like that!" He reached the gate and saw Ji Chunhua on a ladder hanging red lanterns, with Li Jianqun directing from below. Chen Qi watched for a few moments, then walked in. The four junior editors had their work clearly divided: two were receiving readers, and two were sorting letters. Of the three rooms, two stood empty—just right for the mail. Half a month since the issue went out, several sacks had already piled up. Chen Qi waited a while. When the readers had all left, he signaled for a short meeting. "Have the order sheets from every place been totaled?" "Totaled!" "And the mail subscriptions?" "Sorted out too!" "Good. I'll keep it short. The New Year is right in front of us. All of you have to take your holiday and go home, and the printing plant has to rest as well. Leave everything else until after the New Year. Today's task is to work out one figure, and see exactly how many copies of our inaugural issue we sold in this half month!" He gave a great wave of his hand, and at once they threw themselves into the fight. Spirits ran high. Everyone knew the magazine was popular, and that new orders came in every day. They only lacked one final, precise number. Liang Xiaosheng even brought out an abacus. That's right—an abacus! Never mind the 1980s; in the 1990s plenty of places were still using abacuses. As for that calculator thing, it depended on how widely it had spread in a given place... "This one's five hundred copies!" "So is that one!" "These that went through the post office—are they orders for the next issue, or this one?" "Both, both. Didn't I separate them? Don't you miscount!" Abacus and hand reckoning together, they bustled at a furious pitch. Chen Qi did the cooking himself, boiling noodles for everyone, with several eggs cracked in. He had also bought pickled vegetables and cooked meats—sausage, pig's ears, a big piece of pig's head meat—plus a bottle of liquor. When he had things more or less ready, he went to the office to look. "Done? If not, eat first and count after. Noodles clump if they sit." "Right away, right away!" "I've still got a little here... Done!" Sweat had broken out on one editor's head. He flung his pen down, snatched up a sheet of paper, and said loudly, "World of Wonders inaugural issue, released January 1. One full half month. Advance orders: 30,000 copies. Additional orders since: bookstores in the various places, 68,200 copies; individual subscriptions by post, 2,092 copies! Our inaugural issue has already broken 100,000 copies!" "Clap, clap, clap!" They couldn't help applauding. Chen Jianjun had said that seventy or eighty thousand copies of the inaugural issue would already be very good, and a hundred thousand better still. Coming as it did at Spring Festival, it felt all the more like a double happiness at the door, bright and jubilant. Chen Qi was clapping too. He laughed and said, "Time to eat! Time to eat!"