Source work

Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone)

Original authorCao Xueqin (the first eighty chapters, circulated in manuscript from the 1750s); Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan (the one-hundred-and-twenty-chapter print of 1791-92)
First publishedmanuscript copies from the 1750s; first printed 1791-92
Public domainConfirmed
Legal reviewConfirmed

Adaptation proposal

A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world

Adaptation note

Proposal A keeps the shape and the order of the public-domain novel: the stone left over from the mending of the sky and the child who comes into the world holding it; the orphaned cousin who arrives and the cousin who arrives with the locket that matches; the Garden built for one visit and lived in for the years after; the poetry club, the crab party, the old countrywoman who visits twice; the household's accounts and the manager who stretches them; the search of the rooms and the maid sent away; the bride who is not the one expected; the ransacking and the closing of the account; the stone given back and a copyist who reads what is written on it. It moves all of this into a world where people are made and then kept on a share: the mending of the sky becomes a net of care, the household's allowances become what keeps each person going, and the decline of the House is the shrinking of that sum. The book is a quiet omniscient novel told by the stone itself, with no document frame. No translation is used for wording, and the verse is new. Violence and desire are not shown, and the source's religious figures are replaced by a guild of menders and by people who withdraw from a share. The title plays on two senses at once: what each person is allowed, and making allowances.

Adapted into

  • Classics Adaptation · Serialized Fiction

    Allowances

    The Houses of Rong and Ning, and What Each Was Kept On

    When the makers' age was ending they let a net down over the whole world so that the people they had made could go on being kept, and they cut one stone too many. The spare was set at the side of the road and forgotten, and it listened. Years later it is carried to the House of Rong, where a second son is being added to the roll, and it asks to see what the keeping is for. It will not be entered in any book. It will watch the House, its tables and its Garden, its quiet arithmetic of who is kept on what, and the ways the people in it make allowances for one another, until the sum it is allowed begins to shrink.