Following Mo Yan's Nobel Prize , the usually silent Chinese literary circle got warmed up again. A Shanghai writer named Jin Yucheng surprised nearly everyone by making his novel full of Shanghai dialect.

Published in 2012, the 350,000-word Blossoms （Fan Hua） is a novel about the changes in Shanghai over 30 years, drawing clear images of the city through the stories of many common people. There is no main story like most novels, but every story in it could run independently. While putonghua is the standard choice for Chinese literature today, Jin's use of the Shanghai dialect appears both different and bold.

"I have seen too many novels that look similar to each other. Chinese literature is getting monotonous in both language and form. I want to be special with my own language, " Jin told the Global Times.

In the novel, Jin makes a breakthrough by mainly using dialogues to unfold various plots and represent typical characters on a daily basis. He also abandons the use of some punctuation like quotation marks （引号）, showing a return to the traditional Chinese huaben genre.

Since its publication, the book has been widely recommended on Sina Weibo with many netizens rating the novel high for its unique use of dialect and vivid description of life using plain speech.

Jin said that he got the idea of writing the novel while chatting in an online forum where people use the Shanghai dialect. The praise he received from the netizens encouraged him to continue writing the random stories.

"I'd like to see more writers to follow my lead. It will enrich our literature and make it diverse," he said.

   Isaac Asimov is one of the most famous science fiction（科幻小说）writers of all time. He moved from Russia to the United States in 1923.He was a teacher at Boston University and began writing science fiction stories in 1939.His most famous works are the Foundation books and the Robot stories. He died in 1992 at the age of 72.

"There are not many people who have invented a useful scientific term，and although I did it unknowingly，I am not going to let anyone in the world forget it，"said Isaac Asimov. He was talking about the word "robotics" —the study of robot behaviour.

Asimov wrote several stories about robots between 1940 and 1990.One of the special features of the robots in these stories was that they were programmed to follow the Three Laws of Robotics.

The First Law: A robot must not hurt a human being，or allow a human being to be hurt.

The Second Law: A robot must obey orders by human beings unless these orders conflict（冲突）with the First Law.

The Third Law: A robot must protect itself unless this conflicts with the First or Second Law.

In Asimov's stories，the robots must follow these laws so that they do not attack the humans that created them.

Some scientists think the Three Laws of Robotics are hard to realise in real life. On the other hand，some say that the laws are great for science fiction but completely useless in real life. For example，if the laws really worked，robots couldn't be used in wars，as this would break the First Law. Since the army is one of the biggest supporters for robotic research，it is very unlikely that an attempt to follow these rules will happen.

According to Asimov，one thing is certain："Robots are changing the world and driving it in directions we cannot clearly foresee（预见）."

   If anyone knows what makes a great children's book，it must be Sussex author and illustrator（插图画家）Jane Hissey. Her "Old Bear" books have achieved classic status in a variety of formats.

I met Jane at her home in the East Sussex countryside and asked her what she thought the secret of a classic children's book was. "That's a difficult one, I suppose it has got to be related to children's stage of development-for young children, pictures on a page that are familiar; for older children, an experience. The book should be familiar, but hold some surprises too to keep the interest. It must inspire and delight them, but there are the things that happen every day."

After the birth of her first child, she gave up teaching and worked on her own artwork, drawing pictures of teddy bears. An editor from a publishing company saw her work and invited Jane to do a children's book. Over the years, from the first "Old Bear" book in 1986, her children have made a huge contribution-especially in terms of plots. She said, "I used to give my children the toys to play with-and they had tea parties and so on. One of my bear characters,' Little Bear', is the same age as Ralph, my youngest, who's seven now. All the children have joined in my work and, in years to come, they will realize how much."

"I hope I'll know when people are getting tired of the characters. If ever they did, I think I'd go on drawing them for fun," Jane continued. "My own children have been very useful to me in my work, but as they are older now, I' ll just have to hope that other people's children can inspire me."