In every large publishing house, there are some young assistant editors.

These young people either just graduated from school or came to this position step by step from the bottom of the publishing house. Their main job is to conduct preliminary selection of manuscripts sent by mail.

This job is tedious and boring. I read manuscripts every day, and they are all manuscripts of newcomers.

Writers with a little more famous will not use this method of submission, but will have corresponding editors responsible.

Assistant editors want to discover manuscripts worthy of publication among newcomers, and then attach their own opinions and hand them over to the editor for review.

This extremely tests the vision and level of the assistant editor.

If an assistant editor can have several new manuscripts verified by the market as best-selling books, it proves that his grasp of the book market will be promoted to a formal editor.

When every editor and editor-in-chief first entered the publishing house, most of them started as assistant editors.

So, although this job is boring, it is very important and is related to whether it can be promoted.

If a high-quality manuscript is lost due to a carelessness, and other publishers publish and publish and succeed, then the assistant editor will become a laughing stock in the industry and may even withdraw from the publishing industry from now on.

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 search for a needle in a haystack. I don't know when this kind of life will end.

Cole is the assistant editor of a large publishing house in New York. The bigger the publishing house, the more fierce the competition.

He submitted dozens of manuscripts in three years, all of which were rejected by the editor-in-chief. Assistant editors of the same period as him either got promoted or changed careers.

After countless blows, he decided to resign next month and make a splash in the financial industry.

At this time, the US economy had recovered from World War I. The financial industry was extremely active. There were often myths of getting rich in the newspapers, which made many Americans want to make quick money in the stock market.

Cole also planned so. So he has not been very motivated to work these days, so he can be lazy if he can.

The mail sending and receiving departments of the publishing house will deliver the latest mail to each department on time, including a batch of new manuscripts.

Generally speaking, letters containing manuscripts will have the words of submission on them. It is easy to distinguish them from ordinary letters.

At this time, several assistant editors were listless and picking. Although they knew that their hope was slim, they also hoped that they could meet a new writer with good writing style and creativity.

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

According to past experience, authors with neat handwriting often create more carefully and write stories that are readable.

Authors with addresses in big cities will give priority to them. This shows that the author's living environment is good and he is likely to have received higher education rather than middle school students.

They rarely touch those letters whose addresses are typed out by typewriters. Such people are too lazy and don’t even want to write on envelopes. It can be seen that they are not the kind of hard-working person.

After selecting other assistant editors, Cole walked up and took the remaining dozen manuscripts to his desk.

He started his day's work.

To be honest, he had no expectations for the remaining manuscripts, and only hoped to finish the work quickly and try his luck on Wall Street.

As expected, these manuscripts are not of high quality, and some manuscripts are not even smoother in sentences, let alone have any new ideas. Most of them are imitations.

At this time, Cole saw a letter from Los Angeles, with the address on it being typed out by a typewriter.

This left him with little reading, but work is work. He opened the envelope and took out the manuscript.

As soon as he touched it, he found that this manuscript was different from other manuscripts. The paper was not the paper from ordinary shops. It came from a printing factory and was printed.

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

This shows that the author has prepared carefully, and he took it out and read it. The title of the book is "A Man in a High Castle".

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

This is Lin Zixuan borrowed the name of the British TV series "Doctor Who". In that long-lived British drama, Doctor Who is a time lord, and there is a time machine that can travel through time and space and adventure everywhere.

Cole didn't know about this, he just thought the title of the book and the author were both strange.

He opened the manuscript and was surprised to find that it turned out to be a science fiction novel.

In this era, there are not many writers who write science fiction novels, and even fewer ones can write well. New writers generally choose realistic themes, which is more life-oriented. Science fiction novels require extremely strong imagination.

This aroused Cole's interest, who has always had a special liking for science fiction novels.

The story takes place one day in August 1962. The heroine Juliana, who lives in San Francisco, practices Aikido in a Japanese gym and defeats Japanese men.

Then, she came to a Japanese shop to go to the Oriental Medicinal Tea and met her sister Chudi in the shop.

Seeing this, Cole found it strange.

Why is Japanese things everywhere in San Francisco? Will Japanese products be so popular in the United States in the future in 1962?

He then looked down and discovered a big problem in the daily life of the heroine Juliana. He was inseparable from the Japanese in both work and life.

Then, Juliana met her sister Thuti again one night. Her sister gave her a roll of film and told her to give the film to the High Castle stranger, which was the task of the resistance organization.

Juliana took the film, and her sister ran away, in an alley, killed by the Japanese military police who had caught up.

Juliana was shocked when she saw her sister being beaten to death by the Japanese. She returned home and played the film on a projector.

She saw that the film was on the film that Americans were celebrating the victory of World War II.

The picture is very real, and both American soldiers and propaganda slogans seem to be true.

She couldn't help but be stunned. The world in the film and the real world are completely different.

Seeing this, Cole was also stunned. He could understand that the Second World War mentioned in this novel was a war that took place in the future. Did the United States fail?

As an American, he is a little unhappy with this novel's setting.

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

When World War II broke out, Germany captured the European continent, Japan occupied the Far East, and then the two countries attacked the United States and divided the United States into two parts.

In 1947, Germany and Japan signed the Peace Agreement to jointly rule the United States, marking the end of World War II, and since then the United States has become a colony of Germany and Japan.

Cole recalls the heroine's daily life again, and is influenced by Japan in every aspect and is completely enslaved.

This future made him shudder. Will the United States become a colony of other countries one day?

He looked around and found that other colleagues were still looking listlessly at the manuscript, and couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.
Chapter completed!