In every major publishing house, there are young assistant editors.

These young people, who have either graduated from school or have progressed from the bottom of the publishing house, are primarily responsible for the primary selection of mailed manuscripts.

This job is tedious and boring, every day is to read manuscripts, and they are all new people's book manuscripts.

Writers with a little fame will not use this method of submission, but will have a corresponding editor in charge.

The assistant editor is to find a manuscript worthy of publication among newcomers, and then attach his or her own comments to the editor-in-chief for review.

This is a great test of the assistant editor's vision and level.

If an assistant editor can recommend a few new manuscripts that have been verified as bestsellers by the market, he or she will prove his grasp of the book market and will be promoted to full-fledged editor.

Most of the editors and editors-in-chief start as assistant editors when they first join the publishing house.

Therefore, although this job is boring, it is very important, and it is related to the question of whether you can be promoted.

If a high-quality manuscript is lost out of the hands of a spur of the moment, and other publishing houses publish and publish it successfully, the assistant editor will become a laughing stock in the industry, and even quit the publishing industry.

But after working for a long time, assistant editors will inevitably lose confidence.

Because the quality of the newcomer's manuscript is really unsightly, it is undoubtedly a needle in a haystack to select the works that satisfy the editor-in-chief, and I don't know when this kind of day will end.

Cole is an assistant editor at a major publishing house in New York, and the bigger the publisher, the more competition there is.

He submitted dozens of manuscripts over a three-year period, all of which were rejected by the editor-in-chief, and his assistant editors were either promoted or left for a career change.

After numerous blows, he decided to resign next month. Take a dip in the financial industry.

At this time, the U.S. economy had recovered from World War I, the financial industry was extremely active, and newspapers often had the myth of getting rich overnight, which provoked many Americans to want to make a quick buck in the stock market.

Cole also plans to do so, so he is not highly motivated to work these days, and he is lazy if he can.

The publisher's mail department will deliver the latest letters to all departments on time. Among them is a new batch of manuscripts.

Generally speaking, letters containing manuscripts will have the word "contribution" on them, which can easily distinguish them from ordinary letters.

At this time, several assistant editors were listlessly picking and choosing among them, although they knew that there was little hope, but they also hoped that they would meet a new writer with good writing and creativity.

They generally look at the handwriting and address on the envelope.

According to past experience, authors with neat handwriting tend to be more serious in their creation, and the stories they write are readable.

Authors whose addresses are located in large cities will be preferred, which indicates that the author's living environment is good and there is a high probability that he has a higher education. and not at the level of middle school students.

They seldom touch letters whose addresses are typed out on a typewriter, and they are too lazy to even write on envelopes, so they are not the kind of people who work hard.

After the other assistant editors had made their selections, Cole stepped forward to bring the remaining dozen manuscripts to his desk.

He started his day's work.

Truth be told, he didn't expect much from the remaining manuscripts to be picked up, only to finish them quickly and try his luck on Wall Street.

Sure enough. The manuscripts are not of high quality, and some of them do not even make sense of the sentences. Not to mention anything new, most of them are imitations.

At this time, Cole saw a letter from Los Angeles with an address typed out on a typewriter.

It gives him nothing to read, but work is work, he opens the envelope. Take out the manuscript.

As soon as he touched it, he saw that the manuscript was different from the others, the paper was not the kind of paper sold in ordinary stores, but from the printing house, and it was printed.

After all, he has worked in a publishing house for three years, and he still understands some common sense.

This shows that the author has prepared with care. He took it out and looked at it, and the title of the book was "A Man in a High Castle".

The author's name is Doctor Mystery or Doctor Who.

This is Lin Zixuan's borrowing of the name of the British TV series "Doctor Who", in that long-lived British drama Doctor Who is a time lord with a time machine that can travel through time and space and adventure everywhere.

Cole didn't know any of this, but found the title and the author's name strange.

He flipped through the manuscript and was surprised to find that it was a science fiction novel.

In this era, there are not many writers who write science fiction novels, and even fewer can write well, and new writers generally choose realistic themes, which are more life-like, and science fiction requires a strong imagination.

This intrigued Cole, who had always had a soft spot for science fiction.

The story takes place one day in August 1962, when Juliana, a heroine living in San Francisco, practices Aikido at a dojo in Japan and defeats a Japanese man.

Then, she went to a store in Japan to buy oriental medicinal tea, where she met her sister Chuti.

Seeing this, Cole thought it was strange.

Why is it that San Francisco is full of Japanese things, and will Japanese products sell so well in the United States in the future in 1962?

He then looks down and finds a big problem in the daily life of the heroine Juliana, both work and life are inseparable from the Japanese.

Later, one night, Juliana meets her sister Chuti again, who hands her a roll of film and tells her to give it to the Castle Strangers, which is the Rebellion's mission.

Juliana took the film, while her sister ran into the distance, and in an alley, she was shot dead by the Japanese military police who caught up.

Juliana's heart shook when she saw her sister killed by the Japanese, and she returned home to play the film on a projector.

She saw that the film showed Americans celebrating victory in World War II.

The picture is realistic, and the American soldiers and propaganda slogans all look like they are real.

She couldn't help but be stunned, the world in the film and the real world were completely different worlds.

Seeing this, Cole was also stunned, he could understand that the Second World War mentioned in this novel was a war that happened in the future, could it be that the United States lost?

As an American, he was a little unhappy with this setting of the novel.

Sure enough, through the heroine's memories, the world gradually unfolds in front of Cole.

At the outbreak of World War II, Germany conquered the European continent and Japan occupied the Far East, followed by two countries attacking the United States, dividing the United States into East and West.

In 1947, Germany and Japan signed the Peace Agreement for Co-Domination of the United States, marking the end of World War II, and the United States became a colony of Germany and Japan.

Cole once again thinks back to the heroine's daily life, which is completely enslaved by Japanese influences in every way.

This future makes him shudder, will the United States one day become a colony of other countries?

He looked around and was relieved to see that his other colleagues were still listlessly looking at the manuscript.

Thankfully, it's just science fiction, and Cole is secretly glad it goes. (To be continued.) )