"Entropy is irreversible. In a closed system, disorder is the only destination."
In the old Daoist texts, straw dogs were ritual offerings - woven with care, honored for the length of the ceremony, discarded when it ended. In Shi Yi's trilogy, they are the ordinary people of a nation at the height of its power: cherished in speeches, spent without ceremony.
Collected here complete, in a single volume of more than six hundred pages, Straw Dogs in the Golden Age is not one story told three times but three self-contained novels - three independent experiments, conducted with a scalpel's cold precision, on a single question: when the thin ice of a "golden age" begins to crack, what becomes of the people standing on it? The novels share a world's logic, not a plot; each stands alone, and they may be read in any order. The answers arrive in three states of matter.
The Funeral of the Living and the Wedding of the Dead - despair, in its solid state. Adapted from real events, a fever-dream portrait of the dusk of a peaceful era: the structure still stands, still gleams - and swallows, without a sound, anyone who does not fit. Here the living bury their own souls, and only the dead are granted a moment's peace. A sociological cross-section of the banality of evil.
The Glorious Defector - escape, in its liquid state. When order finally liquefies, survival goes feral. A cool-headed observer is stripped of every identity he has - student, son, citizen - until only one thing remains: a life-or-death flight across the Eurasian landmass. Not merely a journey, but a survival course in human nature, and a rehearsal for a future no one wants.
Echoes of Life and Death: A Requiem for an Era - trauma, in its gaseous state. Suppose the war actually came, and went. Forty years after the guns fall silent, a retired journalist crosses the country collecting the voices official history left out - a paratrooper, a farmer, a nurse, a singer, a mother, a monk. The survivors face more than rubble; they face the radiation of memory. This is the final accounting of a collective wound: a long, airless requiem sung after the era's curtain has fallen.
None of these futures has happened - and, as the author writes, none need ever happen. Yet little here is invented from thin air: the trilogy is built from years of conversations with ordinary people about the upheavals their families actually lived through, reassembled into fiction that takes no side and issues no verdicts. It asks only that the next time the word "war" appears - as slogan, headline, or policy - you spend one extra second thinking of particular faces and particular names.
This collected edition has been fully revised by the author and appears here in its first English translation. These three books are dedicated to those drowning in the flood who still struggle to keep their minds clear. If a hard winter is coming, may this volume be a cornerstone on your shelf - or the last memorandum in your pack.
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