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《新科学家》杂志介绍角逐2016年亚瑟.克拉克奖的6部科幻小说
武夷山
2016年7月25日出版的《新科学家》杂志推介了6部科幻小说,它们进入了今年亚瑟.克拉克奖的短名单。8月24日该奖将揭晓。
本书是作者2014年发表的科幻小说Europe in Autumn(秋天的欧洲)的续集。
作者:Dave Hutchinson,英国作家,1960年生。
出版社:Solaris,2015年出版
After the UK’s Brexit referendum result, Dave Hutchinson’s Europe At Midnight, set in a Balkanised near-future Europe, seems more prescient than ever. Sharing the same background (but none of the characters) as his previous novel, Europe in Autumn, it begins in a seemingly hermetic pocket world, the Campus, where in the aftermath of a bloody revolution the new Professor of Intelligence uncovers a dangerous conspiracy. Meanwhile, an investigation into a random stabbing entangles a British intelligence officer in the search for a county imagined into being by an eccentric family of landowners. The two narrative threads gradually merge, climaxing in a mission to infiltrate the Community, a quaint yet sinister English Ruritania underlying Europe’s shattered map.
The novel’s vividly imagined settings and satisfyingly complex intrigue are enlivened by a wry cynicism, some clever misdirection, and a sprinkling of homages to the canon of espionage literature. Like John le Carré, Hutchinson foregrounds the human stories at the heart of conspiracies; like Eric Ambler, he uncovers the heroic impulse in ordinary men caught up in events they only partially witness or understand. Hutchinson expertly carpenters their fractured stories into a satisfying whole, interrogating and satirising the Matter of England and the nature of Englishness with a mordant wit.
作者:Nnedi Okorafor,尼日利亚裔美国女作家,纽约州立大学布法罗分校副教授,2016年5月她的小说Binti刚刚获得“星云奖”最佳小说奖。
出版社:Daw Books/Penguin,2015年5月出版
Inverting the familiar superhero origin story, Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix is the polemical memoir of a self‑styled supervillain, bookended by the story of its discovery in a post‑apocalyptic future. The teller of her own tale, Phoenix Akore, is a prodigy of African descent genetically engineered by a powerful yet shadowy company, Big Eye. Able to raise her body temperature to incandescent heat, she is caged with others like her in a tower in a partially flooded, near‑future Manhattan. The apparent suicide of her boyfriend enrages Phoenix, causing her to destroy her prison; she then vows to destroy the company after an attempt to begin a new life in her homeland is thwarted by Big Eye’s agents.
“It’s crammed with ideas which aren’t always given as much room or depth as they deserve, but it burns with a vital exuberance”
As in all superhero stories there’s plenty of scenery-destroying action, but there are also passages both tender and reflective. The heart of the novel is Phoenix’s education and radicalisation, and her righteous anger at the exploitation of Africa and its peoples, from the slave trade and colonisation to the use of the immortal cell line cultured from the tumours of Henrietta Lacks. It’s crammed with ideas which aren’t always given as much room or depth as they deserve, but as with Okorafor’s equally crammed Lagoon it burns with a vital exuberance. The framing story of how the future finds a use for her memoir reconfigures Phoenix’s revenge with profound irony.
作者:Adrian Tchaikovsky,英国作家,原名Adrian Czajkowski,1972年生。
出版社:Tor
Established fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky deploys old‑school tropes to good effect in Children of Time, his first science‑fiction novel. Spanning 70 centuries, it tells two intertwined stories: the rise of a civilisation of spiders accidentally gifted with intelligence during a botched terraforming attempt, and the desperate search for a new home by the human crew of a starship fleeing a dying Earth. Tchaikovsky evokes considerable sympathy for his arachnid characters, and their struggle to reach out to the guardian angel of an orbiting AI is packed with ingenious ideas. The fate of the humans aboard the deteriorating starship follows a more familiar path, but the novel’s clever interrogation of the usual narrative of planetary conquest, and its thoughtful depiction of two alien civilisations attempting to understand each other, is an exemplar of classic widescreen science fiction.
4. Way Down Dark(澳大利亚三部曲,第一部)。
作品的主人公是17岁的陈(Chan) 姓少年。
作者:James P. Smythe,英国作家,1980年生。除创作外,他还在伦敦讲授创意写作。
出版社:Hodder & Stoughton,2015年7月出版
A decaying spaceship also features in Way Down Dark, the first book of James Smythe’s Australia trilogy. En route to an unclear destination for generations, the ship is threatened with destruction when nihilist Lows invade its upper levels. The casual savagery of the ship’s inhabitants and the moral dilemmas of its teenage heroine, Chan Aitch, are forcefully conveyed: in the first chapter, she kills her mother in order to inherit the reputation that has protected her people. Chan’s reluctant heroism and quest for righteousness eventually uncovers the true purpose of the ship, a revelation that aims her towards new challenges and further volumes in this bleak young-adult series.
5.The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet(通向小小愤怒星球的漫长道路)
据《科幻世界》杂志官方微博:
这本书又被称为“今年你看过的可能是最有趣的太空歌剧小说”。小说讲述了一名年轻人在名为Wayfarer的星际飞船上得到了一份工作,这个飞船将执行一项令人兴奋任务:打开连接两个不同空间的隧道。一群年轻人在长达一年的太空航行中渐渐成为了一家人。
作者:Becky Chambers,她是美国作家,生于加州,学的是表演专业,但家人从事与航天科学密切相关的工作。她在苏格兰和冰岛居住过不少时间。
出版社:Hodder & Stoughton,2015年出版
Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is an altogether more cheerful affair, in which a starship crewed by an exotic mix of humans and aliens wins the contract to tunnel a wormhole to the location of a valuable element. Although it’s a chance to make an enormous profit, there’s a significant snag: despite a newly signed treaty, the warmongering clan that controls the planet in question may not be entirely trustworthy. It’s the stuff of a hundred space operas, but given a fresh perspective by Chambers’ focus on the journey and what the ship’s crew discover about themselves along the way. Some may find the life lessons too easily won, but Chambers’s exploration of diversity and decency is refreshing and witty, with sympathetic characters, snappy dialogue, and a richly imagined variety of aliens and alien worlds.
网上有对同名电子书版本的介绍(http://www.iapps.im/single/33597+):
“本作是由原书作者伊恩•皮尔斯(Iain Pears)构思撰写,开发商 Touchpress 联合 Faber 出版社推出的一本样式雅致的电子书。内部梗概大体同早就发行的精装版实体书一致,却又另外有所延伸。即便是已然看过实体书的朋友,在这里也将获取良多。值得一提的是,实体书中涵盖的不过也就是三个紧密相连的世界,四个寻找答案的探索者。而在本书中虽然也是三个世界,却含有 10 个人物的故事,待用户去挖掘体会。
故事的叙述方式非常特别,自开头第一段起,后面的每段都会穿插多条支线篇章。各个人物的故事情节相互交错,故事各个篇章过度自然。读者阅读时可以顺着截图里所展示的线路去看完某个故事,也可以沿着线路的交叉点去围观另一个角色的人生经历,同这些角色一起在让人分不清真假的世界里探索过去与未来、真实与虚幻的真意。”
作者:Iain Pears,英国作家和艺术史家,1955年生
出版社:Faber,2015年出版
In Arcadia, best-selling author Iain Pears blends time travel and utopian fiction in a story that slips between 1960s Oxford, a dystopian future, and a pocket world created by a fugitive genius. Pears’s clear expositional style steers a sure course through the intricate relationships between the three realms and their various characters towards the climax of an end‑times plot, but above all else this is a story about the power of story: the tales we tell ourselves about our lives, and the autonomy or otherwise of their characters and their relationship with imagination and free will.
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