赏析版2011年7-12月经济学人文章(英汉双语对照)汇(18)

local Barnes & Noble or Waterstone‘s—might not have come to be if it weren‘t for a failed inventor-turned-publisher with aesthetic ambitions. Naive, utopian and romantic, a man named Hugo Gernsback ended up establishing a new strand of science fiction, one that helped shape (and was shaped by) the American century.

但是这类小说之所以会变成自成一体的文学体裁，直至现在可以在你家附近的巴诺书店或是沃特斯通书店内占据整整一面墙，可能是因为一个人的缘故。那就是雨果·根斯巴克，他的志向具有审美情趣，先是想当发明家，失败后转行变成了出版商。天真，乐观，浪漫的雨果最终建立了一种新的科幻小说流派，影响了20世纪的发展（同时也受到了其影响）。

Gernsback had come to America in 1904 with the common immigrant dream of striking it rich. He planned to revolutionise battery technology, but when that didn‘t pan out he turned to scientific-magazine publishing. He started out with mail-order catalogues for his imported radio-equipment business, but, as the years went on, his efforts took a more explicitly literary turn. Amazing Stories, which he founded in 1926, has a fair claim to being the first magazine dedicated solely to what he called ―scientifiction‖. It would go on to help define the genre, publishing the debuts of some of its greatest authors. The ever-expanding community of science-fiction readers and fans was so grateful it named its highest honour after him; there isn‘t an science-fiction writer from Asimov to Zelazny who hasn‘t coveted a Hugo trophy. 根斯巴克在1904年来到美国，胸怀一个普通的移民梦，就是在新土地上大捞一票。他计划革新电池技术，但是最终那个梦想破灭了，他转而投入科幻杂志出版业。他一开始印刷自己的进口无线电装置生意的邮购目录，后来他的事业开始向文学方面偏转。他在1926年创刊《惊奇故事》，很有资格宣称这是第一份完全出版他所谓的―科学幻想‖小说的杂志。这本杂志继续为这一体裁的确立作出贡献，并出版了历史上最伟大的几个科幻小说作家的处女作。日渐壮大的科幻小说读者和爱好者群体对他深表感激，将科幻小说的最高荣誉以他命名。只要是科幻小说作家，从阿西莫夫到泽拉兹尼没有一位不曾渴望获得雨果奖。

But in 1911 all that lay in the future—a topic which, to be fair, was something Gernsback was pretty interested in. As a young man of 27, he was witnessing a new century and a newly revitalised country all at once. America‘s can-do spirit involved a gleeful embrace of technology (the trans-continental railroad! The wizard of Menlo Park: Thomas Edison! Henry Ford‘s Model T!). New inventions, discoveries and achievements seemed to be rolling off the brand-new assembly line every day, and the factual articles of Modern Electrics, Gernsback‘s magazine (its name a kind of romantic statement itself), were hardly capacious enough to contain the sense of possibility. And so he turned, diffidently, to fiction.

但是在1911年这些事还都只是未来，当然，根斯巴克对于未来的兴趣可不小。当时27岁的他同时见证了一个新世纪和一个刚刚回复活力的国家。美国的凡事皆有可能的精神中包含有对于科技的乐于接受（越洲铁路，梅隆帕克的巫师：托马斯·爱迪生！亨利·福特的T型号！）。似乎每天从崭新的生产线上都会产生新的发现，发明和成就，而根斯巴克的杂志《现代电气》（其名字本身在当时就带有一种浪漫特质）里面的说明性文字并不足以承载当时那种皆有可能的感觉。因此，他小心翼翼地开始经营小说。

"Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660", a novel serialised in 12 parts in Modern Electrics, is arguably the first major work of American science fiction. It was avidly read, in later reprints in the 1920s, by the adolescents who would become the first generation of great science-fiction writers. Gernsback‘s story was important and influential, but not without flaws. Jack Williamson, the late, great ―dean of science fiction‖, conceded upon rereading the book seven decades later that ―though Gernsback was not concerned