Preface Ⅱ Recommendation for Vanishing Poems
Everybody has experienced the transformation that science and technology have brought to our lives,but there are only a few people who have realized that science and technology are also having an impact on the boundaries of art. In the fields of artificial intelligence and gene editing,science and technology have in fact become a means of artistic expression.
The poems in the anthology Vanishing Poems are also related to science and technology.This is reflected in the amazing creative process of this book:three Grade 11 students used translation software to randomly input letters of a language which they did not know at all,and then the poems in this book were produced.If this were the end of the story,the reader would most probably consider it to be a profound literary joke,but the authors did not stop there.They added annotations to these poems,which in turn have become another story about the unearthing of human civilization by a non-existent poet.
The connections they establish between the poems and their explanations create a new domain,which enables the book to convey its own literary insight.
(⊿ This preface is written by Yao Haijun,a well-known science fiction publisher who has published The Three-Body Problem.)