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.
几天前，我跟manbetx3.0 的风险投资家李开复(Kai-Fu Lee)共进晚餐。他跟我讲起了一本有趣的反乌托邦科幻小说《北京折叠》(Folding Beijing)，不久前这本书被译成英文，很快获得了雨果奖(Hugo Award)最佳短中篇小说奖。这本书讲的是一个过于拥挤、严格按照阶层划分的首都。在北京，第一等居民享受正常的24小时时间，第二等和第三等的居民不得不分用另外24小时的时间，其中悲惨的5000万底层人口过着一种邋遢、恶劣的生活，并且拥有的时间更短。