内容简介

《如今错乱的我们》是一篇科幻小说，是剧作家艾伦·马斯泰（Elan Mastai）的作品，主要用于帮助读者能够更多地了解未来，增强其科学幻想的能力，激发对异国科幻作品独特魅力的求知欲，切身感受国外科幻小说的艺术内涵，并产生独特的科普阅读效应。

全书分为两个部分，第一部分是男主汤姆在母亲和女友死去、父亲颓废后开始糜烂的生活，一个偶然的灵感，闯进了父亲致力研究的时光机。第二部分，在平行世界的 2016 年里，他一意孤行的举动干扰了当时科学家对时光机的研究，致使实验发生爆炸，但救出的科学家是人类文明的火种，也为现实世界实现“共产主义”奠定基石。

本次翻译实践，选取的是《如今错乱的我们》中第 44 章到第 55 章，着重讲的是主人公汤姆在经历了母亲和佩内洛普去世、父亲颓废等一系列的事情后迷失自我，并通过父亲的原始时光机穿越然后找回自我的过程。

全篇使用叙述的手法，讲述了汤姆在 1965 年的所见所闻所感；同时，大量的描写写体现了主人公的内心活动和作者对小说未来的期盼。

翻译实践原文

44

Although my father’s invention makes time travel feel instantaneous, it comes with a visceral kick that makes a routine teleport to the moon seem like a foot massage. I just became history’s first time traveler, but I’m not really feeling the grandeur of the moment because I’m trying so hard not to throw up 2016’s breakfast onto 1965’s floor.

I take a few seconds to get steady on my feet and orient to my surroundings, and that’

s when it hits me—I’m in the actual laboratory where the future was born. The whole building has of course been maintained as a permanent museum exhibit, with the original Goettreider Engine still in operation in the windowless 500-square-foot basement lab in section B7 of the San Francisco State Science and Technology Center. But visiting it in my time is not the same, obviously, as being here.

I can smell the industrial cleaner wafting up from the chipped tile floor. The lighting, incandescent bulbs under metal cages, warm and steady, casting every surface with a coppery glow. The machinery is state-of-the-art for the time period but looks adorably archaic, like watching heart surgery conducted with sharp sticks.

And there’s the Goettreider Engine itself. It’s  thick and clunky compared to the sleek,

refined iterations that, in the last weeks of his life. The housing is dull steel, hand-tempered by Goettreider to fit his specifications. The absorption coils are wound up in thick rolls of springy filament. The gauges have actual arrows wobbling in their dials and the indication counters have tiny numbers punched into metal rings that revolve around an axis point. The gears look comically large and cumbersome and the venting stacks might as well be Victorian-era chimneys belching smoke. The key component, the Radiometric Pulse-Field Emitter, is the only thing that looks remotely

modern— because its innovative form, with the graded angles and undulating   petals

and interlocked  segmentation, became so  influential on contemporary  style,  spilling

from the lab into architecture, industrial design, fashion, art, cuisine,  everything really.

Standing in the room looking right at it, the machine that changed the world looks hilariously handmade. It’s a miracle Goettreider got any reaction from the assembled observers other than eye-rolling condescension.

Goettreider’s work was considered vaguely interesting from a theoretical perspective

but not exactly promising. A bureaucrat with just enough authority to approve minor grants had taken a shine to Goettreider because he ’ d filled out    the administrative

funding forms in fastidious detail and the bureaucrat was a man who appreciated neat paperwork above all other virtues.