Space is where billionaires dream. Jeff Bezos thinks that we will soon move heavy industry and most humans off-planet onto massive revolving space stations, allowing the Earth to return to a pristine state. Elon Musk has famously argued that in order for humanity to survive all manner of calamities—asteroids, global warming, nuclear war—we must become an interplanetary species. He wants a million people settled on Mars by 2050. Larry Page has described this biosphere “backup” as a “philanthropical” act, and has invested in asteroid-mining ventures that will support it.
空间是亿万富翁梦想的地方。杰夫·贝佐斯（Jeff Bezos）认为，我们将很快将重工业和大多数人偏离行星，使地球恢复到原始的状态。埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）著名地争辩说，为了使人类生存到各种灾难（刺激剂，全球变暖，核战争），我们必须成为行星际物种。他希望到2050年在火星上定居100万人。拉里·佩奇（Larry Page）将这种生物圈“备份”描述为“慈善”行为，并投资了将支持它的小行星开采企业。
Whatever their motivations—charitable, scientific, certainly commercial—their imaginations have long been fueled by science fiction. In stories such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Star Trek, the genre has positioned outer space as the frontier that humanity must cross in order to transcend earthbound dilemmas. Musk, Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are all fans of Iain Banks’s Culture series, which imagines a post-scarcity socialist utopia where all of our measly 21st-century problems have been solved by technological advancement. The arch-capitalists aren’t deterred from pursuing it, though. They just want to have their hands on the controls.
无论他们的动机 - 有钱，科学，当然是商业的动机，他们的想象力长期以来一直被科幻小说所吸引。在艾萨克·阿西莫夫（Isaac Asimov）的基础系列和《星际迷航》（Star Trek）之类的故事中，该类型将外太空定位为人类必须越过超越地球困境的边界。马斯克，贝佐斯和马克·扎克伯格都是Iain Banks文化系列的粉丝，该系列想象着一个后校园后的社会主义乌托邦，我们所有的21世纪有21世纪的问题都通过技术进步解决了。不过，拱门资本主义者并没有阻止追求它。他们只想动手控制。
But what if space fails to live up to its billing? The technology for extraplanetary stations large enough to accommodate extensive human life remains theoretical. Martian soil is toxic, the air unbreathable, the atmosphere so thin that anyone who spent even a short time on its surface would be hit with massive doses of radiation. And our prejudices and hierarchies will almost certainly follow us to the stars. If, as seems likely, these planets are first populated by private companies such as SpaceX, then off-planet settlers would be dependent on their corporate sponsors for food, air, and life-sustaining technology.
但是，如果空间无法辜负其账单怎么办？足以适应广泛人类生活的足球外站的技术仍然是理论上的。火星土壤有毒，空气不可呼吸，气氛如此稀薄，以至于任何在其表面上花费短时间的人都会被大量的辐射击中。而且，我们的偏见和等级制度几乎肯定会跟随我们进入星星。如果这些行星似乎最初是由SpaceX等私人公司填充的，那么外行定居者将取决于其企业赞助商的食品，空气和维持生命的技术。
This skepticism has its own science-fiction tradition, in which space exploration follows the patterns of exploitation visible already on Earth. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 The Word for World Is Forest envisions space exploration as a recapitulation of earlier colonial conflicts. In Bong Joon Ho’s most recent film, Mickey 17, a desperate space colonist volunteers himself to be cloned again and again, exchanging a lethal job for passage to another world. A similar cannon-fodder dynamic appears in Claire Denis’ 2018 film, High Life, in which a group of criminals, sentenced to death on Earth, are enlisted in a suicide mission and directed straight into a black hole—space exploration as prison labor. And such fatal bargains are all over the work of the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who directed RoboCop and Starship Troopers, movies in which the bodies and souls of regular people are commandeered for the benefit of the powerful.
这种持怀疑态度具有其自身的科幻传统，在这种传统中，太空探索遵循地球上已经可以看到的剥削模式。Ursula K. Le Guin的1972年《世界之词是森林》设想的空间探索是对早期殖民冲突的概括。在Bong Joon Ho的最新电影Mickey 17中，一个绝望的太空殖民者志愿者自己一次又一次克隆，将致命的工作交换为通往另一个世界。克莱尔·丹尼斯（Claire Denis）的2018年电影《高生活》（High Life）出现了类似的炮毒动态，其中一群被判处死刑的罪犯被邀请参加自杀任务，并直接直接直接陷入黑洞 - 空间探索作为监狱劳动。电影制片人保罗·韦尔霍文（Paul Verhoeven）的作品遍及导演Robocop和Starship Troopers的电影，电影中的电影和灵魂在其中，普通人的身体和灵魂都受到了强大的好处的益处。
In Pip Adam’s extraordinary, humane novel Audition, recently released in the United States, space is both the dystopian place where humanity’s worst impulses flourish and a site of uncharted possibility where humans can become something entirely new. The story follows three giants who are hurtling through space. Once, they were all regular-size humans, but then, for unknown reasons, they began to grow until they were at least three times the size of other people. They were feared, and then hated, and then, in their strange way, envied. As a result, they were packed off into spaceships and shot away from Earth—heading, like High Life’s prisoners, for a black hole.
在Pip Adam最近在美国发行的非凡的，人道的小说试镜中，太空既是反乌托邦的地方，人类最糟糕的冲动蓬勃发展，也是一个未知的可能性的地方，可以使人类成为全新的东西。这个故事跟随三个巨人在太空中奔波。有一次，他们都是常规尺寸的人类，但是由于未知原因，它们开始成长，直到至少是其他人的大小的三倍。他们被恐惧，然后讨厌，然后以奇怪的方式羡慕不已。结果，他们被打包到宇宙飞船中，并从地球上射出，像高级人生的囚犯一样，为一个黑洞，像高中的囚犯一样。
Audition By Pip Adam
Pip Adam的试镜
Their ship is designed according to a strange, symbiotic principle: It gets its power from the giants’ speech, and the giants must speak so that they don’t grow even more. Yet something has gone wrong. When the novel begins, Alba, Stanley, and Drew, the remaining crew of the Audition, are trapped throughout the ship—one crammed into a hallway, another wedged between the floor and ceiling of a basketball court. At one time, it seems, the giants had staged a sound strike, refusing to speak with one another or to the ship. Only too late did they realize that their silence made them grow much more rapidly than before, and now they barely fit aboard.
他们的船是根据一个奇怪的共生原则设计的：它从巨人的演讲中获得了力量，巨人必须讲话，以便他们不再成长。然而，出了问题。当小说开始时，其余试镜的船员阿尔巴，斯坦利和德鲁被困在整个船上 - 一个被挤进了走廊，另一个楔入了篮球场的地板和天花板之间。看来，巨人队一次进行了声音打击，拒绝彼此交谈或与船交谈。直到太晚才意识到自己的沉默使他们的成长比以前更快，现在它们几乎不适合在船上。
So the trio speak with one another from where they’re stuck, their voices carrying through the pipes and the walls. Pages and pages of dialogue go nowhere and carry no real meaning. They speak in the plural, almost as a collective, like a sci-fi variation on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. “We were giant on Earth, and it was terrifying—for everyone,” Alba says, but her thoughts could well be the group’s. They describe many things as beautiful, many times, and repeat the meal schedule: Monday is “vegan superfood buddha bowl day.” Tuesday is “Greek roasted fish with vegetables.” Whenever they try to tell stories about their own pasts, the events sound awfully like the plots of mediocre rom-coms such as Never Been Kissed and the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Maid in Manhattan. Whenever they approach something like the truth, their words do not seem up to the task of describing it, and they continue speaking in a roundabout, inane manner. Alba believes that she is in space simply because it “is the biggest room so there is no reason for me to go anywhere else.”
因此，三人从他们被卡住的地方互相讲话，他们的声音遍布管道和墙壁。对话的页面和页面无处不在，没有真正的含义。他们在复数中说话，几乎是一个集体，就像弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf）的《海浪》上的科幻差异一样。阿尔巴说：“我们在地球上是巨人，对每个人来说都很恐怖。”他们将许多事情描述为美丽，多次，并重复进餐时间表：星期一是“素食超级食物佛陀碗一天”。星期二是“希腊烤鱼和蔬菜。”每当他们试图讲述自己过去的故事时，这些事件听起来都像是从未被亲吻过的平庸的rom-com的情节和曼哈顿的詹妮弗·洛佩兹（Jennifer Lopez）的女仆。每当他们接近真相之类的事情时，他们的话似乎都不符合描述它的任务，并且他们继续以回旋处的方式讲话。阿尔巴（Alba）认为她在太空中仅仅是因为它是“最大的房间，所以我没有理由去其他任何地方。”
All this uninformative talk encourages the giants to attack themselves rather than whoever put them on the Audition. It becomes clear, although they are only intermittently aware of it, that before they took off, the giants were confined in an open-air stadium they call “the classroom.” There, the giants gradually lost all sense of self. Their days were spent learning dull, repetitive tasks. Their life histories were replaced by those romantic-comedy plots. And they were made to think of themselves as essentially inferior. “The best thing is to be stupid and we are stupid,” Alba says. “It is a gift we needed to return to. It is better to be stupid and it is better to not try and work out things.” They repeat, to the point of absurdity, phrases such as I want to say and The story is. All those extra words filling the air don’t just fuel the ship; they also prevent its inhabitants from realizing what has been taken from them.
所有这些无知的谈话都鼓励巨人攻击自己，而不是让他们参加试镜。尽管他们只是间歇性地意识到这一点，但很明显，在他们起飞之前，巨人队被限制在一个称为“教室”的露天体育场中。在那里，巨人逐渐失去了所有的自我意识。他们的日子花在学习沉闷，重复的任务上。他们的生活历史被那些浪漫喜剧情节所取代。他们被认为是本质上是劣等的。“最好的事情是愚蠢，我们很愚蠢，”阿尔巴说。“这是我们需要返回的礼物。最好是愚蠢，最好不要尝试做事。”他们重复了我想说的诸如我想说的话，故事是荒谬的。所有这些填充空气的额外单词不仅为船代加油。他们还阻止其居民意识到他们已经从他们那里拿走了什么。
Adam is showing how even language, the medium of the novel, can be polluted, corrupted, and transformed into a means of exploitation. Words turn from meaningful communication into pure, distracting noise. In a rare silent moment, the group reflects on how cheeseburgers sound: on the grill, as they’re being put together, and especially in the mouth. This inspires another thought: that despite remembering the meal schedule, the giants have not eaten in a very long time, and, incarcerated in the ship, they might well starve to death. But their trained language distracts them. “They really have nothing to complain about because really a bit of discomfort isn’t so much,” their collective thought goes. “Really. Like not so much.” They cannot be silent long enough to actually think, and they have been transformed into their own hall monitors.
亚当（Adam）展示了语言，即小说的媒介，可以被污染，腐败和转化为一种剥削手段。单词从有意义的沟通变成纯粹的，分散注意力的噪音。在一个难得的沉默时刻，该小组反映了芝士汉堡的声音：在烤架上，将它们放在一起，尤其是在嘴里。这激发了另一个想法：尽管记得饭菜的时间表，但巨人队很长一段时间以来一直没有进食，而且在船上被监禁，他们很可能饿死了。但是他们训练有素的语言使他们分心。他们的集体思想说：“他们真的没有什么可抱怨的，因为确实有些不适并没有那么多。”“真的。不那么多。”他们的沉默不能足够长的时间来真正思考，并且已经变成了自己的厅监视器。
They are heading toward the event horizon of a black hole, a natural phenomenon that the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, in an epigraph, describes as “the ultimate prison wall—one can get in but never get out.” Clearly, Adam is investigating what happens to the incarcerated, and as time passes, her main trio’s confinement begins to look more purposeful than before. When, about halfway through the book, they pass through the event horizon, time distends, and realization floods through them all about how they knew one another before the classroom—even before becoming giants. They’re marked and bonded by shared damage, violence, and shame; this might even, Adam implies, be the source of their growth. This realization reconfigures the entire book, recasting their ongoing dialogue and seemingly cordial relations as an interstellar jail—and the novel itself into an extended, especially cruel prison sentence.
他们正朝着黑洞的事件视野前进，这是哈佛天文学家阿维·勒布（Avi Loeb）在题词中的一种自然现象，称为“终极监狱墙 - 一个人可以进入但永远不会出来”。显然，亚当正在调查被监禁的情况，随着时间的流逝，她的主要三人的监禁开始比以前更有目的。当书中大约一半时，他们经过活动的地平线，时间差异，并意识到他们在教室之前（甚至在成为巨人之前）彼此认识的方式泛滥成灾。他们被共同的伤害，暴力和羞耻所标记和束缚。亚当暗示，这甚至可能是他们成长的根源。这种认识重新配置了整本书，重新塑造了他们持续的对话和看似亲切的关系作为星际监狱，而小说本身本身陷入了长期的，尤其是残酷的监狱刑罚。
Audition can be a caustic, biting book, full of insights into the many cages we construct for the unwanted. But the event horizon, which at first represents their permanent banishment, becomes a frontier of hope when they finally cross it. They find themselves in an endless space beyond, which imposes no limit and seems to shape itself around them and their needs. There, they encounter other life-forms, and are offered some kind of status as visitors. Life in this new world comes with its own struggles and demands and obligations, yet without the divisions and distinctions that trapped them within the ship. After so much speaking, they find themselves deciding on what to do next, then acting together, not as opponents confined within a closed system but as participants in something huge and fluid and vitalizing. “They’re all inside her and she’s inside all of them,” Alba thinks, “although maybe inside and outside are pointless at this stage.” Only through the achievement of some new, unheard-of association can they hope to be free of their past shame, and discover as-yet-unknown pleasures.
试镜可以是一本苛刻的书籍，充满了对我们为不需要的构建的许多笼子的见解。但是，最初代表其永久放逐的事件视野，当他们最终越过时，它们成为希望的边界。他们发现自己处于无尽的空间，这没有限制，似乎在他们周围和需求周围塑造自己。在那里，他们遇到了其他生命形式，并以某种身份作为访客。这个新世界的生活带有自己的斗争，要求和义务，但没有将它们困在船中的分歧和区别。经过这么多的讲话，他们发现自己决定了下一步该做什么，然后做出行动，而不是在封闭的系统中局限于对手，而是作为巨大，流畅和活力的参与者。阿尔巴认为：“它们都在她的内部，她都在所有人的内部，尽管在这个阶段内部和外部可能毫无意义。”只有通过实现一些新的，闻所未闻的联想，他们才能希望摆脱过去的羞耻感，并发现尚未尚未尚未享受的乐趣。
Like the billionaires and their sci-fi dream weavers, Adam is using outer space to imagine alternative forms of human relation. But with Audition, she wants to escape the gravitational trap of Earth’s prejudices and hierarchies, its forms of ownership and exploitation. Rather than making space a lockup for the unworthy, or a new frontier upon which to exert our will, she searches for something far more expansive among the stars. We must move, she suggests, beyond the hard borders that separate, isolate, and constrain life on Earth today. Across the event horizon lies true possibility. But first we must find our way out of the cage.
像亿万富翁及其科幻梦织工一样，亚当正在利用外太空来想象人类关系的替代形式。但是通过试镜，她想逃避地球偏见和等级制度的重力陷阱，其所有权和剥削形式。她没有让空间成为不值得的锁定，或者是付出我们意志的新边界，而是在星星中寻找更广阔的东西。她建议，除了将当今地球上分离，隔离和限制生命的硬边界之外，我们必须移动。在整个活动中，地平线是真正的可能性。但是首先，我们必须找到离开笼子的出路。
