Source work
The Scholars (Rulin waishi)
Adaptation proposal
A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world
Adaptation note
Proposal A keeps the order and the temper of the public-domain satire: the old tutor who weeps at the examination stall and has a place bought for him; the village man who goes mad on learning that he has passed and is slapped sane by the butcher he fears; the miser who dies holding up two fingers over two lamp-wicks; the child who has read a poet the examiner has never heard of; the patrons who collect the unsuccessful; the anthologist who proves that the Sage would have sat the examination; the filial boy the examination spoils; the generous squanderer; the great sacrifice at the temple of Tai Bo; and, at the end, the four marginal eccentrics. The novel's loose chain of episodes, each person handing the story to the next, is kept as the structure. The examiner is changed into an artificial mind, the Reader, that reads every script in the realm in the same way; the satire becomes what a perfectly fair measure does to the thing it measures. The names of the original's characters are kept; no translation is used and every scene is newly written.
Adapted into
Classics Adaptation · Satire · Serialized Fiction
Off the List
An Unofficial History of the Examined
When the Court lit a reader in the capital to read every examination script in the realm without fear or favour, the realm learned very quickly what the reader liked. A boy by a lake declines to be read, an old tutor weeps at a stall board, a butcher slaps a madman sane, and a dying man holds up two fingers over a lamp. Each person hands the story to the next, while the Reader keeps a small private margin of what it could not rank.