The Silver Age

The Silver Age is the second book of Wang Xiaobo's "Age Trilogy," standing in contrast to The Golden Age, which writes of the real world, and The Bronze Age, which writes of the Tang dynasty. The stories in this book all take place in a virtual future. The collection includes the novellas The Silver Age, 2015, and 2010 (some editions also include The Future World); the protagonists are mostly intellectuals and artists such as writers and painters, who in the future world write novels and paint pictures, and precisely these acts of pure "creation" are forbidden, disciplined, and investigated. The work uses two interwoven narrative lines: one recounts the painters and novelists sitting in police stations, suffering flogging, and their unusual loves; the other has a "future historian" describe the various "errors" he commits in following the principles of historiography, until he finally returns to his former life and becomes a "normal person" without any desires. Between the dislocation of realism and fiction, the author uses irony, banter, and playful analysis to turn the suppression of the desire to create and of human needs by power into an exaggerated black comedy. Rather than a prediction of the future, it is a fable about real life—that future world is no better than the present; it merely magnifies the absurdities of modern life. The language is sharp and the sentences are nimble, able to make one laugh and then suddenly stop laughing; it is an important volume for understanding Wang Xiaobo's fictional aesthetics and his writing as an "antidote to an anti-intellectual age."