Liu Shuang rubbed his hands, full of expectations for the science fiction journey that was about to begin.
The beginning of the novel did not disappoint him.
"In the unmarked quiet void at the end of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way, hangs an unnoticed, small yellow star. In an orbit about 14,710 kilometers away from it, orbits a completely insignificant blue star.
Asteroid…”
This is exactly what was written in the book that a reader picked up at the Tianwang Exhibition Hall. It is also the first sentence of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
As soon as this sentence is read, it makes people feel majestic and majestic, making the starfish look like an invisible dust.
This book should be as grand as the Three-Body Problem, no, it should be a science fiction novel even more grand than the Three-Body Problem.
But as the reading started, Liu Shuang felt something was wrong.
Why does this book sound so funny?
The story begins with a house.
The owner of the house woke up early in the morning and found a demolition team outside the door. He was told that the house would be forcibly demolished, but he had not received any demolition-related notices before yesterday.
When he learned about such a thing yesterday, he went to the relevant departments to see the announcement, but it took a lot of effort to find it in the cellar.
And this announcement has been in this cellar for nine months.
Liu Shuang was amused by this black humor, and then he thought, this paragraph seems to be mocking the failure of functional departments to do their jobs?
The previous paragraph has nothing to do with science fiction, but then a character appears, the protagonist's good friend, an unemployed actor.
The book clearly introduces him as a mobile investigator who specializes in traveling the universe and contributing information to a work called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
Then the story began to get on the right track, and the forced demolition of the protagonist's house became insignificant as the story progressed, because now even the entire Starfish is facing the fate of being demolished.
Ironically, the experience of Starfish being demolished is very similar to that of the protagonist's house. A man claiming to be from the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Committee told mankind in a voice that can be heard all over the world: The Milky Way is going to build a fast lane and Starfish needs to be destroyed.
The time left for the Starfish Man is only two minutes.
Seeing the panicked humans, the administrator even laughed and said: There is no point in pretending to be so surprised. All plans and demolition orders have been publicized by the planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty years. You have enough.
time to file a complaint.
Liu Shuang felt funny when he saw this paragraph, but he couldn't laugh because it was Haixing's "low-level humans" who were being ridiculed, and he was one of them.
No extraordinary hero appeared to turn the tide, and the starfish was destroyed.
The protagonist followed his alien friend onto the spaceship and left.
Although "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has been introduced more than once before, it was only when Liu Shuang saw this that he truly understood what hitchhiker meant.
Starfish, the last human being, became a hitchhiker and began a galaxy wandering journey with another friend from the planet Betelgeuse.
The Milky Way slowly unfolded before Liu Shuang's eyes like a scroll.
But this painting looks very funny.
There is black humor everywhere and jokes that are similar to logic games.
Especially the ending part, whether it's The Meaning of Life 42 or Starfish Order, makes people feel ridiculous and funny.
There is a race that specializes in building planets for rich people. They built starfish according to an order from a pan-dimensional race.
And this pan-dimensional race turned out to be rats on a starfish. Human experiments on rats were actually carefully arranged by rats. In fact, rats were studying humans.
The mouse paid for the customization of the starfish and was also the manager, which humans knew nothing about.
After reading the entire book, Liu Shuang felt that this was Zhang Zhong's least memorable science fiction novel.
To say that it has no memorable points is not to say that the book is not good, but that compared to other novels, this book is weak in its story line.
Zhang Zhong seems to pay more attention to black humor and a kind of logic game. There are still many things he can recall, such as those strange aliens, the deep-thinking super computer, and the meaning of life 42.
The plan of the Galactic President.
But these are not plot points.
The story of the whole novel has been unfolding in a relaxed and happy atmosphere, and every short paragraph you can see a quotation that makes people smile.
Of course, if you think about it carefully, these black humors also have some deep-seated meanings. For example, the demolition of Starfish and the Wogon Guards seem to be making fun of functional departments and civil servants’ corpses.
It's quite fitting to see a book like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" on April 1st.
…
Many readers expressed great surprise after reading the new book, because this book is completely different from Zhang Zhong's other science fiction novels.
[Is this a book specially written by Zhang Da for April Fool’s Day? If nothing else, it’s really funny. 】
[Why don’t I find it funny? It feels quite boring, completely different from what I thought.]
[This kind of black humor also depends on the person.]
[I think it’s quite funny, but it’s not a complete list of jokes. This kind of black humor is mainly for satire.]
[I think there are a lot of thought-provoking places, and aren’t there a lot of discussions about life in it? 】
[Yes, the meaning of life is that forty-two is so awesome.]
[I don’t understand something here. Why is the meaning of life forty-two? 】
[It’s okay if you don’t understand, but what if you understand the meaning of life? 】
[This can’t be a number Zhang Zhong made up casually, right?]
[I guess it has something to do with the Tao Te Ching. Don’t you know what Chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching is? 】
[Shit, I went to check it out. The content of Chapter 42 is that one life is two, two is three, and three is all things. Is this the truth of the universe? 】
【Maybe that's the case.】
[You can pull it off, I guess it has something to do with the binary system and the Book of Changes. 42 converted into binary is 101010, and 101010 in the Book of Changes symbolizes the sixty-four hexagrams Weiji. Yin and Yang are interdependent, and the cycle begins again and again, endlessly. 】
[Here I go, this is the boss, but why is 101010 the 64th hexagram of Zhouyi? What’s the principle? 】
[Do you know Yang Yao and Yin Yao? If 1 represents Yang Yao and 0 represents Yin Yao, it happens to be Yang Yao Yin Yao Yang Yao Yin Yao Yang Yao Yin Yao. This is the Weiji hexagram. Sixty-four hexagrams are Yin Yao and
The six-digit combination of Yang Yao, for example, the first hexagram Qian is six Yang Yao, and the second hexagram Kun is six Yin Yao.】