漂流瓶中的信：刘慈欣的《死神永生》 [美国媒体]

Message in a Bottle: Death’s End by Cixin Liu

漂流瓶中信：刘慈欣的《死神永生》

Niall Alexander 
Tue Sep 20, 2016 9:30am 3 comments 2 Favorites [+]



The translation and publication of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body books has been a singular highlight of the science fiction scene in recent years. The Hugo Award-winning opening salvo of said saga took in physics, farming, philosophy and first contact, and that was just for starters. The world was wondrous, the science startling, and although the author’s choice of “a man named ‘humanity'” as that narrative’s central character led to a slight lack of life, The Three-Body Problem promised profundity.

刘慈欣的《三体》的翻译出版已成为近年来科幻界突出的亮点。这部斩获雨果奖的传奇作品开场就装进了物理学、农林养殖、哲学和第一类接触等内容，而这仅仅只是开胃小菜。壮观的世界、惊人的科技，尽管作者选择“名为‘人性’的人”作为叙事的中心人物使得略欠烟火气，《三体》不负所望深刻隽永。

A year later, The Dark Forest delivered. Bolstered by “a complex protagonist, an engrossing, high-stakes story and a truly transcendent setting, The Dark Forest [was] by every measure a better book” than The Three-Body Problem. Not only did it account for its predecessor’s every oversight, it also embiggened the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy brilliantly and explored a series of ideas that astonished even seasoned science fiction readers.

一年后，《黑暗森林》出版。定调为“一个经历复杂的主人公，一个引人入胜孤注一掷的故事，以及一个真正超然的背景设定”，《黑暗森林》从各方面来说都超过《三体》，它不仅仅圆了前作所有的疏忽之处，还出色地提升了“地球往事”三部曲，并且探索了一连串连资深科幻读者都会震惊的创意点子。

But “no banquet was eternal. Everything had an end. Everything.” And when something you care about does approach that point, all you can do is hope it ends well.

但“聚散终有时，万物始有终”，当你的心头好也将步入那一刻时，你所能做的就是期待好的结局。

In the first, it’s as expansive a narrative as any I’ve ever read. Most books, at bottom, are brief histories of human beings, but Death’s End is different. It’s a history of the whole of humanity in the whole of the galaxy that begins, albeit briefly, in 1453, continues concurrently with the events of The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, before concluding a matter of millions of years later. All told, the sweep of the story Cixin Liu is determined to depict is absolutely staggering.

首先，我从没有读过任何故事能如够此广阔。多数图书充其量是人类的简史，但《死神永生》不同，它是整个宇宙里的整个人类的历史，约略始于公元1453年，然后紧接着《三体》和《黑暗森林》发生的事件，结束于千万年后。千言万语一句话，刘慈欣志在描绘故事的宽广度绝对令人震惊。

For all that, though, Death’s End has a single character at its core rather than the vast casts this series’ readers have had to keep track of in the past. Cheng Xin is a fiercely intelligent if especially sensitive aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century—the time of the Trisolar Crisis, which period of panic followed the catastrophic first contact chronicled in The Three-Body Problem:

尽管如此，《死神永生》只有一个核心角色，而非前作让读者们不得不去记住的众多角色。程心是个极其聪明尤其感性的航天工程师，来自二十一世纪初，恰逢《三体》里记载的灾难般的第一类接触后随之而来的恐慌期。

The Trisolar Crisis’ impact on society was far deeper than people had imagined at first. […] In terms of biology, it was equivalent to the moment when the ancestors of mammals climbed from the ocean onto land; in terms of religion, it was akin to when Adam and Eve were banished from Eden; in terms of history and sociology… there are no suitable analogies, even imperfect ones. Compared to the Trisolar Crisis, everything heretofore experienced by human civilisation was nothing. The Crisis shook the very foundation of culture, politics, religion, and economics.

三体危机带来的文化冲击，其影响之深远也远超过人们当初的想象。如果为其寻找一个类比，在生物学上，相当于哺乳动物的远祖从海中爬上陆地；在宗教上，相当于亚当和夏娃被逐出伊甸园；而在历史和社会学上，根本找不到类比，人类文明所经历的一切与这一事件相比都微不足道。事实上、这一事件动摇了人类社会的文化、政治、宗教和经济的根基。

To wit, with a common enemy coming, the people of planet Earth essentially come together and put several survival stratagems into action. The Wallfacers of The Dark Forest were one; the Staircase Project, Cheng Xin’s plan to embed a spy in the Trisolaran ranks—basically by sending a frozen brain into space—is another. It’s desperate, yes, but times like these call for measures like those.

准确来讲，随着共同敌人的出现，地球上的人终于能携手并肩，为生存而使出三十六计。《黑暗森林》里的面壁者为其一；程心设计把间谍安插进三体人的“阶梯计划”，其本质是向太空发送冷冻的大脑为另一方案。看似穷途末路，但非常时刻行非常手段。

Sadly, the Staircase Project is a failure from the first, or at least seems to be, because the brain—of one of our attractive protagonist’s many admirers, as it happens—is blown off course before it reaches the needed speed. That mishap means the likelihood of the Trisolaran fleet even finding it is low; negligible enough that when Cheng Xin first enters cryogenic suspension, ostensibly to await the next step of the Staircase, it’s really only to make the people that have pinned their hopes on her happy.

不幸的是，阶梯计划从一开始就失败了，或至少说貌似失败了。因为碰巧是我们这位迷人主角的众多爱慕者之一的大脑，在达到预期速度前偏离了航向。这场不幸意味着三体舰队能找到大脑的可能性很小。更不用提当程心第一次进入冬眠，表面看是为等候阶梯计划的下一步，其实只是让那些曾寄希望在她身上的人们拍手称快。

In the eyes of historians, the Staircase Project was a typical result of the ill-thought-out impulsiveness that marked the beginning of the Crisis Era, a hastily conducted, poorly planned adventure. In addition to the complete failure to accomplish its objectives, it left nothing of a technological value. […] No one could have predicted that nearly three centuries later, the Staircase Project would bring a ray of hope to an Earth mired in despair.

在历史学家看来，阶梯计划是典型的危机初期激情和冲动的产物，是一次没有经过周密计划就草率进行的冒险。除了结局的完全失败，在技术上也没留下什么有价值的东西。……谁也没有想到，在近三个世纪后，阶梯计划为绝境中的地球文明带来了一线曙光。

And Cheng Xin is there to see it. To feel it, even. But so much has changed by the date she’s awakened! Humanity has entered a period known as the Deterrence Era. Following the state of stalemate established by the Wallfacers in The Dark Forest, the Trisolarans have stopped advancing.

程心等到了能亲眼目睹甚至亲身参与的那天，但她被唤醒之时，世事早已变迁。人类已经进入了所谓的威慑纪元，随着《黑暗森林》里的面壁者创造的僵局，三体人已经停止进击。

Yet there are other threats, because “the universe contains multitudes. You can find any kind of ‘people’ and world. There are idealists like the Zero-Homers, pacifists, philanthropists, and even civilisations dedicated only to art and beauty. But they’re not the mainstream; they cannot change the direction of the universe.” Where, then, is the universe headed? Why, where we all are: towards “the only lighthouse that is always lit. No matter where you sail, ultimately, you must turn toward it. Everything fades […] but Death endures.”

然而还有其他威胁，因为“宇宙是丰富多彩的，什么样的‘人’或世界都有。有归零者这样的理想主义者，有和平主义者，有慈善家，还有只专注于艺术和美的文明，但它们不是主流，不可能主导宇宙的走向。”那么，宇宙会引向何处？为何，我们都朝向那“唯一一座永远亮着的灯塔，不管你向哪里航行，最终都得转向它指引的方向。一切都会逝去，只有死神永生。”

But what if it didn’t? What if the life of the individual, and likewise the life of the universe, could be prolonged to the point that death itself ended? “If so, those who chose hibernation”—people like Cheng Xin—”were taking the first steps on the staircase to life everlasting. For the first time in history, Death itself was no longer fair. The consequences were unimaginable.”

可是万一不是这回事呢？万一个体的生命类似宇宙的生命，能够延长至死亡本身终结的那刻呢？“那么那些现在就冬眠的幸运者”-比如程心-“就踏上了永生的第一个台阶。这样，人类历史上第一次连死神都不公平了，其后果真的难以预料。”

You don’t get to know about those, though. Not because I won’t tell you, but because Death’s End is so stupidly full of electrifying ideas like these that a good many of them are roundly erased mere pages after they’ve been raised. Before you know it the Deterrence Era is over and the Broadcast Era begun, but the Broadcast Era is soon superseded by the Bunker Era, the Bunker Era by the Galaxy Era and the Galaxy Era by the age of the Black Domain.

然而你无法知晓这些，不是因为我不告诉你，而是因为《死神永生》像“蠢驴”一样满满当当地全是这样的激动人心的创新点子，其中好多点子被提出仅仅数页就销声匿迹。还没觉得威慑纪元结束，广播纪元就开始了；广播纪元立马又被掩体纪元取代，然后掩体纪元被银河纪元取代，银河纪元被黑域纪元取代。

There’s enough stuff in this one novel to fill trilogies, and a lot of it lands; I got chills during an abstract chat with a four-dimensional entity, and I thrilled when I learned of the escape of a certain spaceship. That said, some of Death’s End‘s overabundance of substance rather drags. Cheng Xin, for instance. She acts as the narrative’s anchor, allowing readers to acclimatise to each new Age just as she has to on every occasion she’s awakened from hibernation. Alas, she also has an anchor’s personality, which is to say, you know… none. She’s pretty and she’s sensitive and, needless to note, she’s a she, yet in every other respect she resembles the bland “man named ‘humanity'” from The Three-Body Problem more closely than The Dark Forest‘s interestingly conflicted curmudgeon of a central character.

这一本小说的内容足够填满一套三部曲还绰绰有余，与四维体的抽象交谈让我不寒而栗，而某太空飞船的逃逸让我欢呼雀跃。也就是说，《死神永生》部分过剩的素材相当拖累。举个例子，程心起了播音主持的作用，让读者适应每个新的时代，因为她恰好每次都得从冬眠中醒来。诶呀，她也有播音主持的性格，就是说，你懂的，她漂亮且感性，更不用说，她是女性。除此之外其他所有方面，她都比《黑暗森林》的那个玩世不恭的老顽固主人公更符合《三体》所谓的“名为‘人性’的（男）人”。

Ultimately, it’s the ideas Cixin Liu tends to in Death’s End that are going to grab you, rather than its protagonist. It’s the incredible ambition of this book that you’re going to write home about, as opposed to its fleeting focus on the minor moments. And that’s… disappointing, I dare say. But it’s nowhere near a deal-breaker. I mean, if you want to tell the story of the whole of humanity in the whole of the galaxy, as Cixin Liu attempts to, then the human beings at the heart of such a vast narrative are fated to feel frivolous.

最终能抓住你的心的，当然是《死神永生》里刘慈欣倾注的创意点子，而非主人公本身。相对于小节上的朝三暮四，本作想表达的雄心壮志才是你应该重点着墨的。我敢说，令人失望，但绝对没到要毁的程度。我的意思是，如果你想讲述整个银河里的整个人类，就如刘慈欣所尝试的，那么处于如此宏大故事核心里的人类注定是无足轻重的。

Death’s End bites off more than it can chew, to be sure, and absent the emotional underpinnings of The Dark Forest, it’s more like The Three-Body Problem than the marvellous middle volume of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which somehow managed that balancing act. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, here at the end: The Three-Body Problem was awesome. Death’s End is in every sense at least as immense.

肯定的讲，《死神永生》贪多嚼不烂，且缺乏《黑暗森林》里的情感基础。相比起地球往事三部曲绝妙的第二部，《死神永生》更像《三体》而未能兼顾好两者。但我之前说过，并在书评最后再说一次：《三体》非常棒，《死神永生》在各种意义上至少一样好。