小说与文学2020newyorker.com
金·斯坦利·罗宾逊：疫情正在改写我们的想象力
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations
导读
这篇《纽约客》文章借疫情讨论我们的想象力如何被改写：科学支撑的现代生活既强大又脆弱，人们是否真在构想不同的未来值得追问。对写作者而言，它提供了把危机写成思想转折、把未来叙事写成价值判断的样本。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
写未来或危机时，不要只写事件本身，要写人物对“接下来会怎样”的想象发生了变化。
- 02
让结尾承担论证功能：人物选择前进、返回还是躺平，会暴露作者对科技、谦卑与责任的态度。
- 03
处理宏大议题时主动引入反方证据，例如科学进步的数据，避免把文章写成单向的愤世嫉俗。
- 04
用具体隐喻把抽象社会问题变成可感叙事，例如把世代飞船写成地球的缩影。
HN 评论精选
作者对科技与谦卑的态度会通过情节解决方案暴露；批评者认为“退回地球”的结局回避了人类别无退路的现实。
我对金·斯坦利·罗宾逊感情复杂。他的《火星三部曲》很棒，想象出一种现实、又不那么糟糕的未来，也描绘了替代性社会组织，比如地方平等主义政府常被犹豫和缺乏共识拖累。但我对他的后期小说《极光》感到不适：世代飞船明显隐喻地球，殖民者遭遇生态问题，抵达后又被致命病原体击碎希望；作者似乎认为这是祖先狂妄的报应，科学无能为力，认可的解决方案是返回地球、躺在海滩享受海浪。可我们无处可回；必须收敛狂妄，但解决问题的唯一方向是向前。
dunkelheit查看英文原文
I have weird feelings towards KSR. His Mars trilogy is awesome in imagining a realistic kind of future that wouldn't be so awful to live in. He is interested in alternative forms of social organization and does a good job of depicting them (he is obviously sympathetic to local egalitarian governments but in his novels they are often quite realistically hampered by indecision and lack of consensus). Yet I couldn't but feel disgust towards his later novel Aurora. Spoilers follow. In the novel a group of colonists on a big generation ship (a transparent metaphor for the spaceship Earth) fly towards a nearby star. Near the end of their voyage they encounter lots of ecological problems that they don't quite know how to deal with. When they arrive they are dealt the final blow - the most hospitable planet contains a deadly pathogen that shatters all hopes of establishing a colony. The author is clearly unsympathetic - their problems are the retribution for the hubris of their ancestors. The solution to the problem is emphatically not science and tech, which is helpless (it even can't quite pin down what the pathogen really is). What is the solution that he approves of? Fly back to Earth, quit thinking about anything so arrogant as star expansion and lie on the beach enjoying the surf. Yet we don't have anywhere to go back to. Sure we must temper our hubris but the only way to solve our problems is forward.
疫情中的“未来想象”多停留在回归日常，而非真正构想新秩序。
我不觉得人们真的在更努力地思考未来。绝大多数人平静地选择了社交隔离，但目光投向的是近未来——期待安全后回到从前在做的事，而不是思考自己在某种新事物中的位置。
maxerickson查看英文原文
I sure don't get the sense that people are thinking harder about the future. The great majority have quietly and calmly made the choice to socially distance, but they looking into the near future when they expect to feel safe enough to go back to the things they were doing before, not contemplating their place in something new.
用科学进步的事实反驳悲观叙事，提醒写作别忽略反证与长期趋势。
刚读完史蒂芬·平克的《当下的启蒙》，我怀疑任何把人类写成短视、浪费地球、不顾后代的文章。现实是科学正在大规模消除极端贫困和疾病，也让穷国变富，从而减少污染、放缓人口增长。疫情对经济的打击在穷国会更重，可能拖慢这种进步。作者说地球养活近80亿人只靠科学，并称这“不自然且不稳定”；但要让这些人健康温饱，正需要进一步科学进步，所以我同意“我们无处可退”。
klum查看英文原文
Having just read Steven Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now", I'm skeptical of any article that paints this cynical view of how humans are wasting the earth, living their short-sighted lives with no regard for their future descendants. The reality is that science, described here as "keeping the whole system of technical improvisation from falling down", is eradicating extreme poverty and disease on an incredible scale. It is also making poor countries less poor, which in turn makes their people better off and, yes, make them contribute less to pollution (it also slows population growth). It seems likely to me that the hits taken by the economy in these circumstances will be felt harder in poorer countries, slowing this positive progress for a while. The author actually notes that the earth holding close to 8 billion people is only made possible by science. He describes this as "unnatural and unstable". This, combined with the fact that further scientific progress is required for all these people to be healthy and well-fed makes me tend to agree with the poster reacting the the novel Aurora and noting "we don't have anywhere to go back to".
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