Science Fiction Authors Get Real

文/史蒂夫·保爾森 譯／馬晴晴

Science Fiction Authors Get Real

文/史蒂夫·保爾森 譯／馬晴晴

Movie screens have been thundering with futuristic stories recently,from the fi nal installment1installment（叢書、雜志等的）一部；（小說等）分期連載的一部分。ofThe Hunger GamestoThe Martian. Both fi lms started as books—The Martianoriginally self-published—but it’sThe Martianthat taps into an intriguing trend toward realism. Space travel has been a sci-fi staple for more than a century,and now some of the biggest names in the genre are trying to imagine what it would actually take to send humans to another planet.

[2]The Martianis a white-knuckle2whiteknuckle使人捏一把汗的。thriller, so you might not see the story as a series of science and math puzzles.But that’s precisely why novelist Andy Weir fi rst dreamed up the book that inspired the movie.

“I’m a space dork. I’m a big fan of manned and unmanned space flight,”he says. “And I was sitting around at home, imagining, ‘How could we do a manned Mars mission?’ Not for the purposes of telling a story, but just, how could we do it, just as a thought experiment.”

[3]So Weir tried to work out the science of how an astronaut stranded3strand使滯留。on Mars could get enough oxygen and water and food to survive. His book is what’s known as hard science fi ction4硬科幻，指描寫極其可能實現的新技術、新發明給人類社會帶來影響的科幻作品。在手法上，硬科幻以追求科學（可能的）細節或準確為特性，著眼于自然科學和技術的發展。—a story based on existing or plausible science. And the thing about science fi ction that separates it from just about every other kind of fi ction is that some of these imaginary stories actually become real.

[4]“It is very well-documented that people who work for NASA have been inspired by science fi ction,” says Calla Cofield, a reporter for Space.com who covers the space industry. “And there’s always a back-and-forth, you know,between science fi ction and reality. All of this is about dreaming about what’s going on off the surface of the Earth.”

[5]One of the best-known writers of hard science fi ction is Kim Stanley Robinson. He wrote an acclaimed series of Mars novels in the 1990s, and he’s just come out with a new book calledAurora. Unlike Weir’s near-future story, Robinson’s novel is set 500 years from now.It’s about a space voyage to Tau Ceti5天倉五，又稱為鯨魚座τ星，是在鯨魚座內一顆在質量和恒星分類上都和太陽相似的恒星，距離地球大約12光年。,which Robinson believes could be the nearest habitable star system outside our own. “I guess my working principle was,‘What would it really be like?’ So no hyperspace6hyperspace超空間；超光速狀態。. No warp drive7warp drive曲速引擎，一種超光速的推進裝置。亦指通過扭曲時空來移動飛船的曲速航行。. No magical thing that isn’t going to really happen to get us there,” Robinson says.

[6]Over the years, the idea of a space voyage to Tau Ceti has attracted some of the biggest names in science fi ction,from Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein to Ursula K. Le Guin. Robinson fi gures it would take about 200 years to get there. That means the journey would span several generations.

“What becomes interesting is to think about the people born on the starship who didn’t make the choice to be there.And for two or three generations, you’re born on the ship, you die on the ship.You’re just in between the stars. So it turned into a bit of a prison novel, like you spend your whole life in a Motel 68美國的連鎖經濟型酒店。.”

[7]But suppose you had to go out into space to survive, because the Earth’s ecosystem suddenly crashed?That’s the premise of a new book by another science fi ction heavyweight, Neal Stephenson. In his novelSeveneves, a fl otilla9flotilla小型艦隊。of ships is launched into space.The book goes into considerable scientific detail about how the ships would be powered and what genetic material they’d have to bring along so humans could actually live in space.

[8]“All science fiction and fantasy is to some extent an exercise in worldbuilding,” Stephenson says.Sevenevescomes at a time when there’ve been no human space missions for decades—at least not beyond the International Space Station. He believes we’ve largely lost the will to pursue the really big projects of previous generations,like the massive government initiatives that sent people to the moon and built the interstate highway system. He says the tech industry didn’t help matters when it became so lucrative and attractive to young people with technical savvy.

[9]“For the last few decades, the kinds of really smart geeks who in the’50s and ’60s would’ve been building rockets or something have been moving to Silicon Valley and creating startups to make little apps,” he says. There’s an underlying problem, he adds: We often have trouble imagining what a positive future would look like. And here’s where science fiction comes in. If we want a better future, maybe we need better stories. What we don’t need, he says, are more dystopian stories of civilization in ruins.

“It’s just tired. They take the stuff that we have now—the buildings, the cities,the vehicles—and they kind of throw dirt on them and beat them up and break the windows. And then that’s the future in which these things are all set.”

[10]By contrast, the science fiction writers who’ve tried to imagine plausible scenarios for getting to another planet tend to be hopeful about the future. And their stories have inspired some of the billionaire entrepreneurs who are now looking to the skies.SpaceX10美國太空探索技術公司，一家太空運輸公司，由PayPal于 2002年6月創立。SpaceX開發了可部分重復使用的獵鷹1號和獵鷹9號運載火箭，同時開發Dragon系列的航天器以通過獵鷹9號發射到軌道。founder Elon Musk has cited sci-fi writers Asimov and Heinlein as sources of inspiration.

[11]There is a danger, though, says Kim Stanley Robinson: a fantasy that if humans could just start over on another planet, we could escape all the problems we have here on Earth.

[12]“This idea of a utopia happening on another planet is a story space you go into. So, in that sense, on Mars we can do things right, and it will serve as an illustration or an example for people back on Earth. I mean, I love Mars and I’m interested in Mars. But we don’t need to go anywhere, because this planet is our one and only home.”

And no matter how much we dream,it’s where we’re actually going to live.■

近幾年，大量描寫未來的小說登上了電影銀幕，從《饑餓游戲》最后一部到《火星救援》。兩部電影都改編自小說，《火星救援》起初由作者自主出版，但正是它涉足了有趣的現實主義趨勢。太空旅行成為科幻小說的主題已有一個多世紀，而現在創作這類作品的名家大腕正試圖思考究竟如何才能將人類送往另一個星球。

[2]《火星救援》是一部扣人心弦的驚悚小說，所以你可能不會將這個故事視作一系列科學和數學難題。但那正是作者安迪·韋爾構思這部小說的初衷，該小說后被改編為同名電影。

“我是個太空迷，是各類載人和非載人太空飛行器的超級粉絲，”他說，“還曾坐在家里想象‘我們怎樣執行一次載人火星任務？’不為講故事，只琢磨如何去實現，僅把它當成一次思維實驗。”

[3]因此韋爾試圖搞清楚擱淺在火星上的宇航員怎樣獲得足以生存的氧氣、水和食物。他的小說被稱為硬科幻，即基于現存或極其可能實現的科技而創作的小說。某些虛構的故事變成了現實，這正是科幻小說與所有其他類型小說的不同之處。

[4]“有詳盡記錄表明美國航空航天局的工作人員曾受到科幻小說的啟發。”太空網航天工業撰稿人卡拉·科菲爾德說，“科幻和現實之間總是來回變幻，都是關于離開地球表面的構想。”

[5]金·斯坦利·羅賓遜是最著名的硬科幻作家之一。他在20世紀90年代創作了備受好評的火星系列小說，其新作《極光》剛剛出版。與韋爾近未來小說不同的是，羅賓遜的小說背景設定在500年后的未來。小說描繪了去往天倉五的太空旅行，羅賓遜認為那是太陽系之外距離最近的宜居星系。羅賓遜說：“我想我的工作準則是‘真實情況如何？’因此沒有超空間，沒有曲速引擎，也沒有子虛烏有的魔力帶我們到達。”

[6]多年來，去往天倉五的太空旅行吸引了科幻界的一些大腕，從艾薩克·阿西莫夫和羅伯特·海因萊因到厄休拉·K.勒吉恩。根據羅賓遜的計算，到達那里需要200年，意味著該旅行將跨越好幾代的時間。

“有趣的是想象人們未曾選擇卻出生在星際飛船上。兩三代人生于飛船卒于飛船，生存在星體之間。這有點像監獄小說，好像人一生都在6號汽車旅館中度過。”

[7]但如果因為地球生態突然崩潰，人類不得不進入太空生存呢？這是另一位科幻巨匠尼爾·斯蒂芬森新書的前提。他的小說《七夏娃》中，一支小型飛船艦隊被送入太空。書中描述了如何給飛船提供動力及人們太空生存必須攜帶哪些遺傳物質等大量科學細節。

[8]“所有科幻小說在一定程度上都是一種構筑世界的練習。”斯蒂芬森說。《七夏娃》問世之際正值人類已數十年沒有執行過太空任務，至少沒有離開過國際空間站。他認為我們已經不再決意追尋前幾代人創立的宏偉目標，比如載人登月和建立州際公路系統這樣的大型政府計劃。在這方面，科技行業未能有所助益，因為該行業變得如此利潤豐厚，令精通技術的年輕人趨之若鶩。

[9]他說：“那些聰明極客們如果身處五六十年代，應該會去制造火箭之類的產品，近幾十年來，他們紛紛遷到硅谷創業，制造小小的應用。”他補充道，有個潛在的問題，我們常常難以想象未來世界的樣子，而這正是科幻小說的來源。如果我們想要美好的未來，可能需要構筑美好的故事，但我們不需要更多的反烏托邦式摧毀文明的故事。

“那些故事利用現實中的東西，如各種建筑、各座城市、各個交通工具，在某種程度上把它們弄得灰頭土臉、荒廢失修、破破爛爛。之后，在它們構建的未來，把所有這一切都安置妥當。”

[10]相反，科幻作家試圖想象可能到達另一星球的情節，他們對未來充滿希望。這些故事啟發了一些坐擁數十億資產的企業家，他們現在把目光投向太空行業。太空探索技術公司創始人埃隆·馬斯克就將科幻作家阿西莫夫和海因萊因視為靈感來源。

[11]但存在一種危險，金·斯坦利·羅賓遜說，有這樣一種幻想，如果人類在另一星球便能開始全新生活，那么我們就能逃避在地球上遇到的所有問題。

[12]“在另一星球上建設一個烏托邦，這一理念是我們自己營造的故事空間。這樣，從這個意義上說，在火星上我們不會行差踏錯，對地球上的人來說，這便可以作為一種例證或榜樣。我是說，我喜歡火星，對火星感興趣，但我們不需要去任何其他星球，因為地球是我們唯一的家園。”

而且不論我們有多少幻想，這里才是我們必將生存的地方。 □

科幻作家趨向真實

BySteve Paulson

（譯者曾獲第七屆“華政杯”全國法律翻譯大賽二等獎。譯者單位：對外經濟貿易大學英語學院）