
About this episode
Dead Souls, the second book in the "Hospital" trilogy, was written by Han Song and published in 2018 as Wangling by Shanghai wenyi chubanshe in China . It was first published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2025.
Dead Souls continues the story of the Hospital, which has now moved to Mars. The story is told in the second person, from the perspective of Yang Wei, who is appointed to help rewrite Principles of Hospital Engineering, a foundational text for the hospital. Yang Wei is the son of Einstein, a patient who leads an uprising against the doctors. Yang Wei struggles to understand the hospital's history and his own identity, as he navigates the complex relationships between doctors and patients, and the living and the dead. He discovers a pool where the dead are resurrected as "Dead Souls," and learns that he contains a collection of Dead Souls from around the world within his body. The novel follows Yang Wei as he witnesses the hospital descend into chaos, culminating in a battle between patients and a group of "Holy Warriors" led by an overgrown child named Zifeiyu.
The novel is full of allusions to Chinese history, politics, philosophy, and literature, and draws inspiration from science fiction writers and Studio Ghibli films. It explores themes of memory, identity, faith, and the nature of reality through the lens of the hospital, which is portrayed as a microcosm of society.
#DeadSouls, #HanSong, #DystopianFiction, #ScienceFiction, #ChineseLiterature, #HospitalTrilogy, #Mars, #MedicalScience, #DeadSoulsResurrection, #CosmicHospital, #PoolOfDeadSouls, #UniversalTreatmentMachine
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