洛杉矶时报:《死神永生》 壮丽三部曲划上句号

It’s a good time to be an alien hunter. In August astronomers discovered Proxima b, a potentially life-supporting planet only 4.2 light-years away. Not long after, news surfaced of a possible signal coming from HD164595, a star in the Hercules constellation, first noticed by Russian scientists in 2015. Then there’s KIC 8462852, better known as Tabby’s Star, a body whose inexplicable light fluctuations have inspired a rash of speculation. Are we finally going to learn that we’re not alone? If so, will it be good news?

现在是成为外星人猎人的好时候。今年八月，天文学家发现了比邻星b，是一颗距离我们只有4.2光年的宜居行星。之后不久，有消息传出，可能有信号来自武仙座的编号为HD164595的恒星，最早是由俄罗斯科学家于2015年探测到。之后是编号为KIC8462852的恒星,更为人熟知的名字是喵星【Tabby是以最早的研究论文的第一作者Tabetha S. Boyajian命名，原意虎斑猫泛指猫】，这颗恒星有着明显的光亮起伏变化，引起了大量猜测【有观点认为是外星文明在建造戴森球】。难道我们终于能知晓我们不是宇宙中的唯一？这会是好消息吗？

For Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, the answer is almost certainly no. Like Stephen Hawking, who has long warned about the dangers of sending messages into space, Liu’s vision of extraterrestrial contact is anything but peaceful.

而对中国科幻作家刘慈欣来说，答案就是个大大的“不”字。与长期警告不要向太空发送信息的斯蒂芬·霍金类似，刘所预见的地外接触一点都不会和平。

In his Hugo Award-winning 2006 novel “The Three-Body Problem” (translated into English by Ken Liu in 2014), Liu described a first contact scenario in which Chinese radio astronomer Ye Wenjie discovers a species called the Trisolarians, so called because their home world circles three suns in an unstable orbit. Though the Trisolarian who receives her message warns her of danger, she persists in communicating anyway. Having watched her father get beaten to death with belt buckles during China’s Cultural Revolution, she feels that society can use an intervention.

刘慈欣在其2006年出版的雨果奖获奖作品《三体》（由刘宇昆译成英语并在2014年出版），描写了一个第一类接触的故事情节，中国射电天文学家叶文洁发现了叫做三体人的种族，因其母星以不稳定的轨道围绕三颗恒星公转而得名。尽管接收到叶的讯息的三体人向她预警，她仍坚持通讯。在中国文/革时期目睹其父被皮带扣抽打，叶深感人类社会需要有外界介入。

But even Ye Wenjie doesn’t anticipate the consequences of her discovery. Upon learning about Earth, the Trisolarians send a fleet to wipe out humanity and take over its real estate. In the two sequels to the novel — “The Dark Forest,” which appeared in English last year, and now “Death’s End” — Liu describes humanity’s effort to confront the most extreme crisis it has ever faced.

但连叶文洁都不曾料到她的发现所造成的后果。在得悉地球之后，三体人派遣舰队想要一举扫平人类并接手人类的家园。之后的两部续作，一年前英译出版的《黑暗森林》，以及现在出版的《死神永生》，刘描写了人类如何直面有史以来最严峻的危机。

Liu is a maximalist, and the scope of his books allows him to explore all sorts of sci-fi interests. He writes about the effects of hibernation technology on society, artificially constructed parallel universes, an enemy that has mastered near-perfect surveillance abilities and a video game-based religious cult. Liu is also a maximalist in structure; while the first two books in the trilogy told a relatively linear story, “Death’s End” doubles back to the beginning of the “Crisis Era” to re-tell that history from the perspective of another character, Cheng Xin.

刘是个极繁主义者，他笔下的广阔领域能让他探究所有的科幻热点。他写冬眠技术对社会的影响、人工建造平行世界、掌握完美监控能力的敌人、以及源于电子游戏的邪教。三部曲前两部讲了相对线性的故事，而《死神永生》回到“危机纪元”伊始，以另一角色程心的视角重新讲述那段历史。

Xin is an aerospace engineer who works on a far-fetched effort to send a preserved human brain into space. Although the brain is technically dead, Xin and her colleagues hope that the Trisolarians will have the technology to revive it, thus providing humanity with an agent in the Trisolarians’ midst. Because the brain isn’t expected to reach its destination for hundreds of years, Cheng Xin is put into hibernation.

程心是一名航天工程师，从事将一个封存的人类大脑送入太空的希望渺茫的计划。尽管从技术上讲，大脑已经死亡，但程心及其同僚寄望三体人有科技能复活它，从而成为人类安插在三体人中的间谍。由于大脑需要数百年才能到达目的地，程心进入冬眠状态。

When she wakes up 264 years later, it turns out that the brain went off course long ago and hardly anyone remembers it anymore. But because she happens to own a star, given to her by the brain donor as part of another short-lived program, Cheng Xin has become wealthy and famous. She is soon called upon to defend humanity in what has become a state of mutually assured destruction with the Trisolarians. From here, “Death’s End” continues past the time frame of its predecessors, stretching almost to the end of the universe.

当她在264年后苏醒，却发现很久以前大脑就已偏离航向，已经没什么人记得这回事了。但由于碰巧大脑原主人曾经在另一短命计划里赠送给程心一颗星星，她名利双收。随即她被召唤并接受保卫人类的使命，已演变成与三体人确保共同毁灭的性质。从这里开始，《死神永生》超过了前作的时间框架，几乎一直延伸到宇宙的尽头。

With such a dramatically expanded temporal canvas, it’s no surprise that Liu also expands the alien cast. In “Death’s End” spaceships encounter mysterious artifacts when they pass through a region of fourth-dimensional space, and we meet a killer super-civilization, which wages war by altering the laws of physics. But like a lot of sci-fi writers, Liu focuses less on the aliens than on the effect their existence has on humanity.

在如此浩瀚无垠的时间长卷上，毫不奇怪刘慈欣也扩充了外星阵容。在《死神永生》里，太空飞船穿过了一片四维空间区并撞见了神秘的人工物品，而且我们还遇见了杀手级超文明能通过改变物理规律进行作战。但与许多其他科幻作家一样，刘更注重外星人的存在对人类的影响而非外星人本身。

In general, Liu takes a dark view of the world. In the second book in the series he posited that the universe is essentially a “dark forest,” populated by predatory species that will wipe out lesser beings in an instant. Though most intelligent life forms know well enough to keep quiet, “there’s a stupid child called humanity, who has built a bonfire and is standing beside it shouting, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’”

总之，刘慈欣有黑暗的世界观。在系列第二部里，他假设宇宙的本质是“黑暗森林”，盘踞着虎狼般的种族，会顷刻间抹平次等生物。尽管多数智慧生物懂得噤若寒蝉，“有一个叫人类的傻孩子，生了一堆火并在旁边高喊：我在这儿！我在这儿！”。

Yet his depiction of Earth civilization in “Death’s End” is charitable. Society goes through some rough spots, but it learns from its mistakes and prioritizes democracy and human rights over military panic. The story is told primarily from the point of view of Chinese characters — a welcome reminder that sci-fi scenarios don’t exist within an exclusively English-speaking world — but his future society is international, with political bodies like the United Nations taking on ever-greater roles.

然而他在《死神永生》里对地球文明的描述算是大发慈悲了。人类社会熬过几次困难期后吸取教训，重民主人权抑军事恐慌。故事主要是以中国角色的视角讲述，很好地提醒我们，科幻故事并不由英语世界独享，未来社会将是国际性的，联合国之类的政治实体会起到前所未有的作用。

Unfortunately, humanity’s desire for peace and prosperity also undermines its survival. It’s a dangerous universe out there, Liu argues, and a global social welfare state may not be equipped to deal with it. Such ideas make Liu’s books compelling reading, and “Death’s End” is the most mind-bending of them all.

不幸的是，人类对长治久安的渴求削弱了自己的生存能力。刘慈欣主张：外面是危险的宇宙，全球社会福利制度或许无法应对。此类想法使其作品令人信服，而《死神永生》是之中最烧脑的一部。

While Liu’s humanity on the whole is conservative, some characters — both heroes and antiheroes — are determined to save civilization at all costs. In “The Dark Forest,” an officer hijacks a starship and takes off into deep space because he believes that Earth will be defeated in the coming war with Trisolaris. The main character in that novel, Luo Ji, achieves a standoff with the alien invaders because of his willingness to destroy humanity as well. And in “Death’s End” we encounter Thomas Wade, an American intelligence officer who is prepared to wage a horrific civil war in order to pursue transformative research into light-speed travel.

虽然刘慈欣笔下的人类总体来说非常保守，一些角色无论英雄还是反英雄，都立志不惜一切代价匡扶地球文明于危难。在《黑暗森林》里一名军官劫持一艘星舰朝深空出发，因为他深信地球会在之后同三体人的战争中落败。书中的主角罗辑，成功地与外星来敌形成对峙，就是因为他也有陪葬人类的魄力。而在《死神永生》里，我们会见到美国情报官托马斯·维德，他为了以非常手段研究光速旅行，甚至准备挑起恐怖内战。

Yet as a novelist Liu has weaknesses that are impossible to ignore: These characters are exclusively men. Liu’s women, in contrast, tend to be nurturing, sentimental and weak. While Xin’s motivations are pure, her inability to make hard choices threatens to be disastrous. “She understood for the first time her own feelings toward this new world: maternal instinct,” Liu writes. “Subconsciously, she saw everyone in the new world as her child, and she could not bear to see them come to harm.” It is women, Liu implies, who are to blame for humanity’s softness, and who are thus responsible for its potential destruction.

然而刘慈欣在写作上也有让人无法忽视的弱点：角色几乎清一色男性；与此相对，刘笔下的女性往往是娇柔的、伤感的、软弱的。尽管程心动机很纯，但无法作出艰难抉择则预示着危险发生。“她看清了自己对这个新世界的感情的实质：母性。”刘慈欣写道：“在她的潜意识中，新世界中所有的人都是自己的孩子， 她不可能看着他们受到伤害。”刘暗示，女性是人类柔软心肠的罪魁，也是人类或将毁灭的祸首。

Such passages point not only to sexism, but to poor characterization generally. Although the books are full of thrilling ideas and scenarios, the characters are little more than cutouts, with gender stereotypes providing the most obvious pattern. This is an unforgivable defect, since science fiction long ago progressed beyond simplistic tales of macho warriors in space.

这些段落观点不仅是性别歧视，也是糟糕的整体人物塑造。尽管全书充满激动人心的点子和剧情，但人物刻画不比纸板模型厚多少，性别的刻板印象尤为明显。这是不容逃避的缺陷，科幻小说发展到现在早就脱离了太空肌肉男的低级趣味。

Even with its flaws, however, Liu’s picture of humanity’s place in the cosmos is among the biggest, boldest and most disturbing we’ve seen; perhaps it’s no wonder that the author himself succumbs to the comfort of familiar parental archetypes. Fortunately, Liu remains true to his dark vision. In this terrifying world, neither mommy nor daddy can save us.

虽有这个那个缺点，刘对人类在宇宙里的地位刻画，是我们所见过最宏伟最大胆且最让人不安的。或许正因如此，作者本人陷于熟悉的双亲意象而不能自拔。还好，刘能保持真我坚持他的黑暗观点，在这可怕的世界里，没有妈咪爹地能够拯救我们。