A few evenings ago, I had dinner with the Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee. He told me about an interesting dystopian sci-fi novel, Folding Beijing, which was translated into English recently and promptly won the Hugo Award for best novelette. The book is about an overcrowded and strictly class-divided capital city in which “first-tier” residents enjoy a normal 24-hour day, and second- and third-tier citizens have to split another 24-hour period between them, with the unfortunate lower 50m living in a way that is nasty, brutish, and — quite literally — short.
幾天前，我跟中國的風險投資家李開復(Kai-Fu Lee)共進晚餐。他跟我講起了一本有趣的反烏托邦科幻小說《北京折疊》(Folding Beijing)，不久前這本書被譯成英文，很快獲得了雨果獎(Hugo Award)最佳短中篇小說獎。這本書講的是一個過于擁擠、嚴格按照階層劃分的首都。在北京，第一等居民享受正常的24小時時間，第二等和第三等的居民不得不分用另外24小時的時間，其中悲慘的5000萬底層人口過著一種邋遢、惡劣的生活，并且擁有的時間更短。