【英文原声版76】Sarah Cole: The Time Machine

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英文文稿+中文翻译

Zachary Davis: I don’t normally have trouble sleeping, but in the rare times I do, I often play this funny game in my head where I imagine I’ve traveled back in time. First, I imagine learning the local language well enough to convince people not to kill me. Then I picture myself learning some craft or job in order to get some food and shelter. And then I imagine getting rich by impressing the local king with all my amazing knowledge about the future and technology. My fantasies are dashed, however, when I realize I can’t actually explain how anything more complicated than a wheel works, and the ancient civilization imprisons me for being a raving lunatic.

扎卡里·戴维斯：我一般不会失眠，但在极少数情况下，我会在脑海中玩一些有意思的游戏，想象自己穿越到了过去。首先，我会想象自己学会了当地的语言，好说服人们不要杀我。然后，我会想象自己学会了一些手艺或技能，来获得食物和住所。接着，我会想象自己凭借对未来世界和技术的绝妙了解打动当地国王，发一笔财。但我的幻想很快就破灭了，因为我发现自己其实解释不清那些比车轮要复杂的机器是如何运转的。古国的人觉得我是个疯子，把我关了起来。

Zachary Davis: The idea of time travel has fascinated people for centuries. In 1733, an Anglican clergyman named Samuel Madden wrote Memoirs of the Twentieth Century about a guardian angel who travels back in time from a dystopian 1997 where Jesuits have taken over the world. Washington Irving’s 1819 short story Rip Van Winkle had a guy fall asleep for 20 years and wake up to a very different world. And Edward Bellamy’s 1888 time-travel book Looking Backward even spawned a political movement and utopian communities. But the author who really took the idea of time travel mainstream was H.G. Wells.

扎卡里·戴维斯：几个世纪以来，人们一直痴迷于时间旅行这个想法。1733年，一位名叫塞缪尔·马登的英国圣公会牧师写了《二十世纪回忆录》，讲述了一位守护天使从1997年穿越回去的故事。在他的想象中，1997年整个世界被耶稣会掌控着，非常反乌托邦。1819年，华盛顿·欧文写下了短篇小说《瑞普·凡·温克尔》，主人公沉睡了二十年，醒来发现世界完全变了个模样。1888年，爱德华·贝拉米写了一本关于时间旅行的小说，名叫《回顾》，它甚至催生了一场政治运动，燃起了人们对乌托邦社会的向往。不过，真正将时间旅行的想法带入主流世界的作者是H·G·威尔斯。

Sarah Cole: So he was really in the center of things, but he was also just a really beloved writer. And he was read by people, by working class men and women, by young people, by people of all around the world. He was translated into tons of languages and also, of course, read in his native English.

萨拉·科尔：威尔斯是时间旅行小说届的核心人物，也是一位真正受人喜爱的作家。他的读者非常多，有工人阶级的男女，有年轻人，遍布世界各地。他的书被翻译成各种语言，当然，也有人直接读他的英语原版。

Zachary Davis: That’s Sarah Cole, professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. H.G. Wells didn’t just pioneer the time travel novel, but really the entire science fiction genre. It all began with his first novel, The Time Machine.

扎卡里·戴维斯：这位是莎拉·科尔，哥伦比亚大学英语和比较文学教授兼人文学院院长。H·G·威尔斯不仅是时间旅行小说的先驱，还是整个科幻小说这个体裁的先驱。这一切都始于他的第一部小说《时间机器》。

Sarah Cole: The Time Machine is what started it. It started all of this for Wells. But I think more importantly, for most of us, it started a whole series of ways of writing and thinking about science and the future and the relation of the individual to a variety of different kinds of cosmic and cosmological structures that helped to form science fiction.

萨拉·科尔：《时间机器》起到了开辟作用。它为威尔斯开启了这一切。但我认为更重要的是，对我们大多数人来说，它开启了一系列新方式来思考并叙写科技、未来以及个人与各个不同的宇宙结构之间的关系，这推动了科幻小说的形成。

Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I’m Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world’s leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Sarah Cole to discuss H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

扎卡里·戴维斯：欢迎收听：改变你和世界的100书，在这里我们为大家讲述改变世界的书籍。我是扎卡里·戴维斯。每一集，我都会和一位世界顶尖学者讨论一本影响历史进程的书。在本集，我和莎拉·科尔教授一起讨论H·G·威尔斯写的《时间机器》。

Sarah Cole: So let's talk about the amazing life of H.G. Wells, which in some ways could be the subject of one of his stories. Well, the most important thing, I think, for all of us to know at the outset is that the Wells who became extremely famous, became a kind of worldwide phenomenon and a political thinker and a writer of all kinds of voice heard really all around the world and many media was actually born into a background in which none of that would have been expected.

萨拉·科尔：我们来谈谈H·G·威尔斯精彩的一生吧。从某种程度上说，这甚至精彩到可以作为一个主题写进他的故事里。我觉得我们有必要从一开始就认识到，虽然威尔斯后来变得非常有名、成了一个世界性的现象级人物、一个政治思想家，写下了各种各样的观点，在全世界许多媒体广为传播。但光从他的出身背景看，我们完全预料不到他会有这么精彩的人生。

Sarah Cole: He was born in 1866 in England, out just outside of London, what's now a suburb of London. And he was born into a family in which his mother was a lady's maid and his father was a gardener, a shopkeeper, and he also was a professional cricketer. But don't let any listeners think of that in terms of an NBA player or something that was not a professional status in the way it is now.

萨拉·科尔：1866年，他出生在英国伦敦郊外，那儿现在是伦敦的一个郊区。他的母亲是女仆，父亲做过园丁、店主和职业板球运动员。但大家不要觉得这和NBA球员差不多，那时候的职业板球运动员完全没有现在的职业地位。

Zachary Davis: Wells was born Herbert George Wells. His nickname was Bertie. But when he grew up he went by his initials: H.G.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯出生时的全名是赫伯特·乔治·威尔斯，昵称是“伯蒂”。长大后，他仅仅保留了名字的首字母——H·G。

Sarah Cole: The life plan for him was to leave school at age 14, which he originally did. That was typical for a late 19th century English person of the lower middle classes or below, and then to be in the drapery trade. So that was the life plan, was that he would be an apprentice to a draper and then move on to, if he was lucky, maybe have his own drapery business.

萨拉·科尔：按照普遍的人生路径，14岁时他就会辍学。最初他也确实这么做了。19世纪末英国中下层和更底层的孩子一般都是这样，辍学后他们会从事窗帘贸易。这就是他原本的人生路径：在窗帘匠那儿做学徒，继续干活，如果幸运的话，兴许会有自己的窗帘生意。

Zachary Davis: But young Wells was very unhappy as a draper’s apprentice. He had grueling thirteen hour workdays and slept in a crowded dormitory with the other apprentices. This kind of existence was pretty common for working class young men in urban England. So, on the one hand, Wells’ early life was pretty miserable.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在窗帘匠那儿做学徒的时候，小威尔斯很不快乐。他每天要辛苦工作十三个小时，和其他学徒一起睡在拥挤的宿舍里。这就是英国城市工人阶级年轻人的普遍生活。从这方面看，威尔斯早年的生活非常悲惨。

Sarah Cole: On the other hand, he was a genius and he had some fortuitous experiences as a child where he found himself in the estate home where his mother was a maid, able to access the libraries there and began his career of reading.

萨拉·科尔：但另一方面，他却是个天才。小时候，一次偶然间他去了母亲服务的那家庄园，到那儿的图书馆看书。这开启了他的阅读生涯。

Zachary Davis: He read everything he could get his hands on, including books on adventure, travel, and foreign worlds. Some of his favorite books were Plato’s Republic, and Thomas More's Utopia. But he was especially drawn to literature about science.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他读了所有他能接触到的书，题材包括冒险、旅行和外国世界。他最喜欢的书是柏拉图的《理想国》和托马斯·莫尔的《乌托邦》。他还特别喜欢有关科学的文学作品。

Sarah Cole: That was the direction that he ultimately was able to go through a series of literal and figurative accidents. He found himself in London in the 1880s and he worked as a journalist, a kind of crack journalist. He was reviewing plays. He was writing all kinds of things. But the big point for us now is that he was able to get a scholarship to study at the Normal School of Science, which was a new university in London that was founded to help train teachers of science.

萨拉·科尔：这也是他最终借助一系列文学和象征手法去往的方向。19世纪80年代，他来到了伦敦，做了一名调查记者。他还撰写了戏剧评论等各种各样的东西。但对现在的我们来说最重要的一点是，他获得了奖学金，去了科学师范学校学习。这是伦敦的一所新大学，成立的目的是为了培训科学教师。

Zachary Davis: There, Wells was steeped in the science of his day. And he was a very curious learner despite his grades.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在那儿，威尔斯沉浸在那个时代的科学中。他的成绩不好，但非常好学。

Sarah Cole: He was not a particularly remarkable or exemplary student. He was always missing class and he failed one of his classes. But the class that he loved the most was biology, which he was able to take with Thomas Henry Huxley, who was the great 19th century biologist and Darwinian. And it was from Huxley that he learned about evolution. And that became kind of an organizing structure in his thought for the rest of his life.

萨拉·科尔：他不是模范生，总是缺课，还有一门课不及格。他最喜欢生物课，因为可以听托马斯·亨利·赫胥黎讲课。赫胥黎是19世纪伟大的生物学家和达尔文主义者。正是从赫胥黎那里，他了解了进化论。这成为了威尔斯后来思想体系中的重要一环。

Zachary Davis: Wells’ scientific education would become one of several inspirations for his novels. During his time at the normal school, Wells also became interested in social reform. He was one of the founders of the school magazine The Science School Journal, in which he wrote about his views on literature and society. He graduated in 1887 at the age of 21.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯的科学教育背景将成为他小说的几处灵感来源之一。在师范学校学习期间，威尔斯还对社会改革产生了兴趣。他是学校的《科学学校杂志》的创始人之一，在杂志上发表对文学和社会的看法。1887年，他毕业了，那年他21岁。

Zachary Davis: He eventually earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology. A few years later, he published his first work, Text-Book of Biology. After leaving academia, Wells was jobless. He stayed with his aunt and earned money by writing short humorous articles for various journals. He was very prolific with these articles, and they became pretty popular.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他获得了动物学理学学位。几年后，他出版了第一部作品《生物学教科书》。离开学术界后，威尔斯没有了工作。他和姑姑住在一起，为各种期刊撰写幽默小品赚钱。他产量很高，这些文章也很受欢迎。

Sarah Cole: And then from there, he began his writing career and his first novel was indeed The Time Machine in 1895.

萨拉·科尔：以此为起点，他开启了自己的写作生涯。他的第一部小说便是1895年的《时间机器》。

Zachary Davis: So, what's the story of The Time Machine?

扎卡里·戴维斯：《时间机器》讲了一个什么故事？

Sarah Cole: So the story is—I mentioned earlier the setting in a kind of comfortable Victorian home in which the never-named Time Traveler has gathered some guests at the opening and one of whom is the frame narrator who's telling this whole story. And he brings them in and they have dinner and over a sort of cigars and claret or whatever. And he shows them—he gives them a little lecture on the fourth dimension.

萨拉·科尔：故事是这样的。我之前提到，故事发生在一个舒适的维多利亚式的住宅中。小说没提到主人公的名字，只叫他“时间旅行者”。小说开篇，时间旅行者和一些客人聚在一起，其中一个是整个故事的框架叙事者。时间旅行者带他们进了屋子，共进晚餐，抽着雪茄，喝着葡萄酒之类的酒水。宴席上，他谈到了关于第四空间的理论。

Zachary Davis: He uses the example of a cube to help illustrate his point. He says that a cube has the first 3 dimensions: length, width, and height. But it also exists for a period of time. This is the fourth dimension. So they all start talking about whether we can move along this time dimension, and the time traveler reveals that, yes, we can.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他用一个立方体举例来阐释自己的观点。他说，一个立方体有前三个维度：长、宽、高。但它也存在于一段时间内，时间就是第四维。他们开始讨论能否可以沿着时间维度移动，时间旅行者说，我们可以。

Sarah Cole: So he shows them a model of a machine he has built. It's a miniature and he says, let's test it out. And they check to make sure there's no trickery. And he pushes the little lever and it woosh!—disappears.

萨拉·科尔：他给他们看了他制造的机器模型，非常小。他说，我们来测试一下吧。他们上前查看，确认没有被糊弄。时间旅行者推了推控制杆，“嗖”地一下，模型消失了。

Zachary Davis: The time traveler says the machine has been sent into the future. And then he shows them the larger version of the time machine. The guests aren’t really sure what they saw, and they’re skeptical that the miniature machine was actually sent into the future. But either way, the time traveler invites them to come back in a week.

扎卡里·戴维斯：时间旅行者说，模型已经被送到了未来。然后他向他们展示了较大型的时间机器。客人们并不确定眼前的事情，怀疑模型是否真的被送到了未来。不过不管怎么说，时间旅行者邀请他们一周之后再过来。

Sarah Cole: And they do. And he's not around. They don't find him there. And then he kind of comes stumbling in all worn and bleeding and looking terrible.

萨拉·科尔：他们赴约了。然而时间旅行者不在附近，他们找不到他。后来他跌跌撞撞地走了进来，流着血，很疲惫，看起来很糟糕。

Zachary Davis: He cleans himself up, serves them all dinner, and then shares his story of where he’s been. He said that earlier that day he finally finished assembling the time machine. He got in it and went on his first trip.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他把自己收拾干净，招待他们吃晚餐，分享了自己的故事，说自己去了哪儿。他说，那天早些时候，他终于组装好了时间机器，坐上了它，开始了第一次旅行。

Sarah Cole: Eventually he arrives in the world, the same location where he would be in Richmond, outside of London, sort of out of London in eight hundred thousand or seven hundred or almost, let's say eight hundred thousand years, give or take into the future. And there he has a series of adventures. The first people he meets are these little kind of miniature people who seem almost like children. They're running around and pointing and they have a language. But it's quite simple.

萨拉·科尔：最终他来到了一个地方，差不多还是在伦敦郊外的里士满，但穿越到了八十万年之后。在那儿他经历了一系列冒险。他遇到的第一批人非常小，看起来像是小孩子一样，跑来跑去，指手画脚，说着一种非常简单的语言。

Zachary Davis: Wells calls these creatures the Eloi.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯称这些生物为埃洛伊人。

Sarah Cole: So he has a series of experiences with them. But he realizes there's more going on. He wants to explore and understand. And early on, he rescued a young woman, a girl-like creature Weena, who is the sort of semi-love interest of the story. She's not a woman. If you're interested in gender dynamics, you'll be pretty disappointed at them. There are almost no women in the whole story. It's a very male world and Weena is somewhere between a child and a woman and the relationship is quite creepy between her and the traveler.

萨拉·科尔：他和埃洛伊人一起经历了一系列事情，但他意识到还会有更多的事情发生。他想去探索、了解这些事情。早些时候，他救了一个叫薇娜的少女。他们在小说中发展出了半是爱情半是友情的关系。但如果你对情感戏感兴趣，那估计会很失望。整个故事中几乎没有女性，是一个基本由男性构成的世界。薇娜也不是人类女性，她的身份介于孩童和女性之间。她与时间旅行者之间的关系非常惊心动魄。

Sarah Cole: So off they go on a trip to explore, to try to find out what's happening. And then they begin to discover—he begins to discover things. One is that the Eloi, as these little people are called, are afraid of the dark. They sleep together. When he tries to sleep outside, they try to pull them in a very scared way. And he had some early encounters with a kind of white, shadowy creature. So he goes off to try to find out what's happening and eventually comes upon some wells. I think it's important that they're described as wells, and he recognizes early on that whatever is down, those wells are going to be critical.

萨拉·科尔：他们一起去旅行、探索，试图弄清楚发生了什么。他们开始发现了一些事情。这些叫埃洛伊人的矮小物种很怕黑，他们睡在一起。时间旅行者在外面睡觉的时候，埃洛伊人很害怕地拉着他。早些时候，他还遇到了一种白色的阴郁生物。他动起身，想要弄明白发生了什么，最后遇到了一些水井。我觉得把它们描绘成水井非常重要。时间旅行者很早就意识到，无论发生什么，这些水井都会很关键。

Sarah Cole: So it seems as if the Eloi are us humans evolved over a million years. His early theories are, well, work has been finished. Strife is over. They live happily with nature. They have what they need to eat. They have what they need to live. There's no inequality. There's no need for much. But there is this weird thing going on and where are the older people?

萨拉·科尔：他发现，埃洛伊人似乎是我们人类经过近一百万年的进化而来的。起初，他以为这就是答案了。所有冲突都化解了，埃洛伊人和自然愉快相处，吃喝不愁，生活无忧，人人平等，人人都不奢求过多。但奇怪的是：老年人去哪儿了？

Sarah Cole: And so what we find eventually are the Morlocks who turn out to be the other side of the human evolutionary line. And what we learn is that humans have split into two species, the Eloi, who live above ground and have that quality, that childlike, frightened quality; and the Morlocks who, living underground are bleached and pale. They are the industrialists of the future. They live in a kind of hellish industrial underground. They are the descendants of the working classes as Wells figures that and their food is the Eloi. They go up above ground and snatch them in the dark and that's what they eat.

萨拉·科尔：于是他发现还有莫洛克人。他们也由人类进化而来。我们这才知道，那时人类已经分化成了两个物种：埃洛伊人和莫洛克人。埃洛伊人生活在地面上，像孩子一样胆小；莫洛克人生活在地上，肤色苍白。莫洛克人是未来世界的工人，生活在地狱般的地下工厂中。他们是工人阶级的后代，以埃洛伊人为食物。他们会跑到地面上，在黑暗中抢夺埃洛伊人，以他们为食。

Sarah Cole: And so it's a horrifying story of a kind of cannibalism, you might say, but of these two directions that humanity has evolved. So the traveler has a bunch of adventures trying to escape. He ends up setting a lot of things on fire. There's a kind of journey across the forest. And so eventually he fights with the Morlocks over his time machine. Poor Weena is lost along the way.

萨拉·科尔：这是个可怕的、人吃人的故事，展现了人类进化的两个方向。时间旅行者冒着许多危险拼命逃离了那个世界。他把周围很多东西都点着了，穿过了森林。最后，他与莫洛克人争夺他的时间机器，而可怜的薇娜在半路失踪了。

Zachary Davis: He eventually manages to get in his time machine and travels even further into the future.

扎卡里·戴维斯：他最终坐上了时间机器，旅行到了更远的未来。

Sarah Cole: He goes forward in time to see what's going to happen. And he makes a couple of stops, a number of millions of years in the future. And his last stop is thirty million years in the future. The Earth is dying. Everything—all life essentially is gone. There's some kind of weird flopping thing out in the water. The sun doesn't really rise anymore. And here Wells is picking up on contemporary theories that the sun was losing its energy and that the Earth was therefore slowly going to cool. And there was a pretty strong consensus among scientists at the turn of the century or a little before that this was happening and that eventually the earth would freeze. It wasn't imminent. It was in the millions to billions, but that was the general view.

萨拉·科尔：他继续往前旅行，想看看未来会发生什么。在几百万年之后的未来，他停了几次，最后他来到了三千万年后的未来。地球正在消亡，所有生命几乎都消失了。水中有一些奇怪的东西在翻腾。太阳不再升起。这里，威尔斯运用了近代的理论，说太阳在失去能量，地球在慢慢变冷。在世纪之交或稍早些时候，科学家们有一个相当强烈的共识，觉得太阳的能量在慢慢减弱，未来地球会冻住——不会发生在近期，要到几百万年乃至几十亿年之后。这是那个时代科学家们普遍的观点。

Sarah Cole: And he gets back into his time machine and manages to get home. And that's what the travelers see. And then he tells the story, which they mostly don't believe. And then the narrator comes back, I guess, the next day to check on him and finds him packing up for another voyage. And he waits for him. But the traveler never returns. And the narrator thinks about where he might have gone into the past.

萨拉·科尔：时间旅行者回到时间机器里，回到了家。这就是他的旅途见闻。他向客人们讲述了这个故事，但他们大多不相信。第二天，叙事者又来拜访他，发现他正在为另一次旅行收拾行李。叙事者等他回来，他却再也没回来。叙事者想他可能旅行到了过去。

Zachary Davis: Scientific advancements in Wells’ time were rapidly changing his society’s understanding of the universe and humanity’s place in it. New ideas like Darwin’s theory of evolution and the theory that the sun was losing energy revealed the temporal nature, the hidden ticking of the clock, to all of life. British culture was in a frenzy to discover more scientific knowledge, an excitement and urgency that Wells’ novels reflect.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在威尔斯那个时代，科学迅速发展，人们对宇宙和人类在宇宙中的地位的理解也随之改变。达尔文的进化论和太阳能量消失等新理论揭示了时间的本质，奏响了所有生命中隐藏的滴答钟声。英国文化正处于发现更多科学知识的狂热之中，威尔斯的小说反映了这种兴奋感和紧迫性。

Sarah Cole: My feeling about Wells is that the sense of gripping-ness is not only about his kind of mastery of a certain type  of suspense genre, but it's about the story that he's telling and the urgency and intensity of the way he thinks about the human condition, whether in time that is the class structure of late 19th century that we talked about in terms of his own life, but which is now extrapolated out into this dystopic future, but also in a larger nets and webs and streams of evolution in terms of the earth cooling and thermodynamics.

萨拉·科尔：我对威尔斯的理解是，这种扣人心弦的感觉不仅在于他对悬疑小说文类的掌握，更在于他对人类状况的思考，而这给人以紧迫感和震撼。他思考的人类状况不仅涉及19世纪晚期他所身处的社会结构，更涉及推想中的神秘未来所展现的人类进化、地球冷却、热力学等等，涉及到各种各样的网络。

Sarah Cole: And at the end of the novel also, there's a lot of talk about how the earth has stopped rotating. So there are all these kind of astronomical scales as well. And so it's the kind of human experience of being in these different constructions where the person is kind of caught in these larger streams and threads of time and space, these larger currents, that was the word I was looking for.

萨拉·科尔：小说的结尾还有很多关于地球如何停止旋转的讨论，有这些天文学方面的内容。它展现了当人类被卷入到这些更宏大的时间线与空间线中，会在这些结构中产生怎样的经历。这就是我想说的。

Zachary Davis: You mentioned that his stories have an archetypal quality, that they're universal in that they're kind of like parables. And I was wondering, if you could talk a little bit more about that quality in the way that, you know, there's enough details to give it some texture, but it's not so specific as to be very time bound.

扎卡里·戴维斯：您说他的故事有一个很典型的特点——很有普适性，很像寓言。您能不能谈谈这种特点。可以讲一些细节来让我们体会一下，但可以不用讲得特别具体，因为咱们节目的时间有限。

Sarah Cole: He was quite the futurist. That was one of the key designations of his form of thinking. That was one of the things he was most famous for as a figure in world, thought he was always called upon to make predictions. You know, just when the World's Fair was in New York in 1938, he was asked by The New York Times to write their cover story about the exhibition called The World of Tomorrow. And everybody was the natural person to go to because he was always thinking about the future.

萨拉·科尔：威尔斯是典型的未来主义者，这是他思想体系的一个关键词。作为全球知名人物，他总被要求预测未来。1938年纽约举行世界博览会的时候，他受《纽约时报》邀请，写了一篇关于世博会的封面故事，名叫《明日世界》。每当要预测未来的时候，所有人都会很自然地想到他，因为他总是在思考未来。

Sarah Cole: And he actually felt that this wasn't just an imaginative exercise. He felt that it was a terrible moral failing of the Western societies that they had not been futurists, that they hadn't really tried to understand what was going to happen. They might say they're doing this or that for the future and in some generalized way, but they hadn't actually turned the great might of their collective imagination to the future.

萨拉·科尔：他其实不仅觉得思考未来可以锻炼人的想象力，还觉得没有出现一批未来主义者是西方社会一个可怕的道德失败之处。人们没有真正尝试去了解将要发生的事情，他们可能会很笼统地说在为未来做这个或那个，但其实他们并没有把恢弘的集体想象力量转向未来。

Sarah Cole: And he saw that as his calling. I've often wondered, and he kind of muses about this in his autobiography, whether he wrote The Time Machine, it was a huge success, so he just kept writing things about the future; or whether this was always the orientation, and this was and had kind of had to be this way.

萨拉·科尔：而他把这看作自己的使命。我经常在想，他在自传中也在想，到底是因为《时间机器》带给了他成功，所以他就一直在写关于未来的东西，还是这其实是他一直的方向，注定就会这样。

Zachary Davis: The Time Machine kicked off a long career for Wells.

扎卡里·戴维斯：《时间机器》揭开了威尔斯漫长职业生涯的序幕。

Sarah Cole: He wrote consistently for the next 50 years. And he wrote. And he wrote. And he wrote in many, many, many different forms. We call them genres today but many of these didn't really have life as a specific kind of writing at the time he was doing them. He wrote textbooks. He wrote non-fiction books, he wrote novels. He wrote pamphlets and manifestos. He made films. He wrote all different kinds of short pieces, short fiction. He had a column in a newspaper. So he was just a phenomenon in that way. And then the last thing I'll say is that over time he became a sort of world intellectual figure.

萨拉·科尔：在接下来的五十年里，他一直在写作，运用了许多不同的形式，也就是我们今天所说的体裁。不过在他那个时代，许多这些体裁还没有成为特定的写作方式。他写过教科书、非虚构作品、小说、小册子、宣言、电影剧本和各种短篇小说，在报纸上有一个专栏。在这方面，他是现象级的人物。渐渐地，他成为了世界知识分子的代表。

Zachary Davis: Wells’ work quickly earned him a reputation as a man of ideas. But rather than philosophical essays, he often used science fiction as a way to explore his political and social ideas.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯的作品很快为他赢得了思想家的声誉。不过他经常用科幻小说、而不是哲学论文来探讨他的政治和社会理念。

Sarah Cole: He had radical ideas. He was a socialist, but he was a very idiosyncratic and kind of eclectic socialist. And his main goal and hope in life was to end war around the world. And he felt that the way to do that was by having a single, unified world government. And so he played with that idea and worked towards that idea in many forms for the next most of his writing career. And over the course of time, he became somebody that would meet with leaders of countries. He met with both Roosevelts in the United States, with Lenin, with Stalin. There were some famous meetings with them. Among all the British prime ministers, Churchill had a particularly interesting kind of on-again-and-off-again relationship with him and read all of his books.

萨拉·科尔：他思想激进。他是一个社会主义者，但是一个特立独行的、折衷的社会主义者。他一生的主要目标和愿望是结束全世界的战争。他认为实现这一目标的方法是建立一个单一的、统一的世界政府。在接下来的大部分写作生涯中，他用多种形式探讨了这个想法，并为这个想法而努力。渐渐地，他开始有机会与各国领导人会面。他在美国会见了罗斯福夫妇，此外还会见过列宁和斯大林。他与这些人进行过一些著名的会面。在所有英国首相中，丘吉尔的关系与他最特殊——他们之间保持了一种有趣的、时断时续的关系，丘吉尔还阅读了他的所有书。

Zachary Davis: How does the time shape the trajectory of his whole career?

扎卡里·戴维斯：时代如何影响了他的职业生涯？

Sarah Cole: Wells is writing in 1895 in London in a particular moment of time, and that is everywhere apparent in these stories. The professionalization of the sciences was happening, of course, but wasn't complete. And so, for example, The Time Machine itself, the time traveler who's never named, who was the protagonist of the story and the main narrator who speaks for most of the tale. The whole story takes place in his Richmond kind of townhouse and they enter his private laboratory. He's never given all the other guests that make up the evening that originally sees a model of the time machine and then later hears the story of time travel that the traveler tells.

萨拉·科尔：1895年威尔斯写作的时候，伦敦正处在一个特殊时期，这点在这些故事中处处可见。科学正逐步职业化，但尚未完全职业化。比如在《时间机器》中，那个从未提到名字的时间旅行者是故事的主角，也是故事主体的主要叙事者，他在小说的大部分篇幅里都在说话。框架故事发生在他里士满的联排别墅里。客人们来到他的私人实验室。那天晚上，他向客人们展示了他的时间机器模型，后来，他又给所有客人讲述了他时间旅行的经历。

Sarah Cole: And then the frame narrator himself, who puts it all together and writes an epilogue. They're all named by their professions. There's a journalist, there's a psychologist and so forth. The time traveler is not. And he's a kind of gentleman scientist. He's an inventor, invents this machine. But anyway, the idea that a kind of layperson might have access to an extremely complex new ideas of science and that might shape the rest of this culture, that it isn't cordoned off or seen as a kind of wrong track.

萨拉·科尔：框架叙事者把这一切放在一起，写了一个结尾。这些人物都以职业来命名的，比如其中有一个记者、一个心理学家等等。但时间旅行者不是。他是一个绅士科学家，一个发明了这台机器的发明家。但无论如何，一个普通人能有机会接触到极其复杂的新科学理念，还能参与塑造这种文化，倒也没有人觉得这有多么不可理喻。

Zachary Davis: Science at the time wasn’t really a big part of the educational curriculum, not the way it is today. It was usually left for higher education. Wells and his former teacher at the normal school, Thomas Huxley, wanted to change that. They believed that science should be the foundation of all education.

扎卡里·戴维斯：在当时，科学并不像今天这样是教育课程的重要组成部分，一般到高等教育阶段才会涉及科学。威尔斯和他师范学校的老师托马斯·赫胥黎想要改变这种状况。他们认为，科学应该是所有教育的基础。

Sarah Cole: And if you think about British education, both at the secondary level, the elementary level, secondary level and at the collegiate and passed level, science was a very marginalized or nonexistent part of that curriculum. So that was something about which Wells came to feel passionately.

萨拉·科尔：在当时英国的教育体系中，无论是在中学、小学，还是大学和毕业阶段，科学在整个课程体系中都非常边缘，甚至不存在。威尔斯热情澎湃地想要改变这一点。

Sarah Cole: But I mention all this to say that science was simultaneously in the kind of general, intelligentsia and culture, but also not thought of as one's education. And I think that's important because these texts, part of their exoticism and wonder, come from the fact that these are ideas that would be new to most people. But the idea that somebody who isn't a professional scientist might have access to them is something that would have been of their time.

萨拉·科尔：不过我提到这些是想说，在普罗大众和知识分子中科学很盛行，但同时它没有被视作教育的重要组成部分。这点很重要，这些故事之所以富有异国情调、令人赞叹不已，部分也是因为这些东西对大多数人来说还很新鲜。不过一个非专业科学家的人也能有机会接触这些理念，这也是他们那个时代的特点。

Zachary Davis: The late 19th century was an era of dramatic scientific and technological progress. There was the invention and refinement of electric lights and electricity, the camera, typewriter, electric battery, telephone, aspirin, sewing machine, and telegraph. But it was also an era of great intellectual debate—especially about the theory of evolution. We’re used to evolution being pretty much universally accepted as true. But at the time, it was still very much a live question.

扎卡里·戴维斯：19世纪末是一个科学和技术急速进步的时代。人们发明并改良了电灯、电力、相机、打字机、电池、电话、阿司匹林、缝纫机和电报。但这也是一个知识分子大辩论的时代，特别是对进化论开展辩论的时代。如今进化论几乎已经普遍被视为真理，我们对此已经习以为常。但在当时，这仍然是一个引人关注的问题。

Sarah Cole: When Wells is writing The Time Machine, Wells began his career. It was anything but settled. And yet it had arrived as a major concept. And I think for example, this idea that there must be what we see apes, we see chimpanzees, we see ourselves, if we are going to accept that there is some connection or relation, we're not going to take the biblical narrative of creationists to place humans came from, how do we read that? The Victorians thought about something they called the missing link, which was the gap, as they saw it, between animals, non-human animals and animals. Wells was always filling in those missing links in his imagination. And that is a big part of the sort of sensation of the tales that he told that were based in biological and other sciences.

萨拉·科尔：《时间机器》开启了威尔斯的职业生涯。尽管那时候所有推想都还没有发生，但作为一个大概念它已经出现了。人们开始思考要如何看待猿和黑猩猩。如果我们同意它们和人类之间有关系，摒弃《圣经》中的创世说，那我们要如何看待这些生物。维多利亚时代的人思考了一些他们所谓的“缺失环节”，在他们看来，这些环节就是动物与人类之间的差距。威尔斯总是在想象中填补这些缺失的环节，这也是他所说的以生物等科学为基础的故事带给人的一种感知。

Zachary Davis: Wells saw science as an incredibly powerful force that could be used to help or hinder humanity. While some scientific advancements improve life such as antibiotics or refrigeration, others, like advanced weaponry can cause enormous destruction. But even with that risk, he believed society should fully embrace science.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯认为科学是一种非常强大力量，会帮助人类，也会阻碍人类。虽然一些科学进步，如抗生素或制冷技术改善了生活；但也有一些技术进步，如先进的武器装备有可能会造成巨大的破坏。但即使有这种风险，他认为社会还是应该完全拥抱科学。

Sarah Cole: That's what Wells wanted to do. He wanted to let it speak. He wanted to listen, and he wanted to organize society accordingly. So he was—this is right at the beating heart of all of his work, this doubleness about science that it could and would and must be our savior, but that its application could and would and very well might be our destroyer.

萨拉·科尔：这就是威尔斯想做的事。他想展现科学的力量，想倾听并据此组织社会。科学的双重性正是他所有作品最有力的主题。科学会且必定会成为我们的救世主，但运用不当也会给我们带来灾祸。

Zachary Davis: Besides time travel, Wells explored other futuristic, scientific, and utopian themes in his other novels, such as The Island of Doctor Moreau, War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. If Time Machine sets off science fiction as a genre, what comes before? And what do you think are some of the other inspirations leading up to his own work?

扎卡里·戴维斯：除了时间旅行，威尔斯还在他的其他小说中探讨了未来主义、科学和乌托邦等主题，这些小说包括《莫罗博士岛》、《星际战争》和《隐身人》。《时间机器》将科幻小说这一体裁推向高潮，那么在这之前还出现了哪些科幻小说？您觉得哪些小说也给了威尔斯的作品带去了灵感？

Sarah Cole: There are lots of them, of course. Frankenstein was always very powerful in his mind. And if we were talking about The Island of Dr. Moreau today in which beings are made from other beings and we'll just say Frankenstein, it looms very large there. I mean, really, I would say that I mean, there are in his utopia's, there was more of course, and other utopian thinkers closer at hand, like Edward Bellamy or William Morris’ News From Nowhere. There was a whole tradition really of 19th century utopian socialist writing.

萨拉·科尔：之前当然有很多科幻小说。《弗兰肯斯坦》在威尔斯心目中一直非常伟大。在《莫罗博士岛》中，很多生物是由其他生物改造出来的，这儿我们显然能看到《弗兰肯斯坦》的影子。这些主题呈现在威尔斯的乌托邦作品中，也呈现在一些相似的乌托邦思想家的作品中，如爱德华·贝拉米的作品和威廉·莫里斯的《乌有乡消息》。19世纪确实出现了乌托邦社会主义文学传统。

Zachary Davis: Wells was also influenced by folklore.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯也受到了民间传说的影响。

Sarah Cole: He often wrote about the ogre in the kind of Western imaginary. He had this idea that the ogre was a holdover from Neanderthals. So he's very interested in the sort of childlike imagination. There are so many literary influences. There are people like Milton's Coma, The Mask, which is another one that comes into a lot of his works, you know, various Shakespeare plays. He was enormously wild about Gulliver's Travels, enormously widely read in especially the English, also the European traditions. He had a special place in his heart for Plato, particularly the Republic, since in his utopian writings, he was trying to think about setting up a perfect society. And so that is the one he returns to the most frequently.

萨拉·科尔：他经常写到西方想象中的食人魔，说食人魔是残存的尼安德特人。他很喜欢一些儿童式的想象，还受到了很多文学的影响。在他的作品中常常能看到弥尔顿的《酒神之假面舞会》以及很多莎士比亚戏剧的影子。他还很喜欢《格列佛游记》，这本小说对英国乃至欧洲文化传统影响深远。他对柏拉图的作品，尤其是《理想国》有着别样的感情，因为他在关于乌托邦的作品中常常思考如何建立一个完美的社会，而柏拉图的这本书是他最常回顾的。

Zachary Davis: Another powerful influence on Wells was Christianity. His mother was very religious and instilled a strong sense of evangelical Christianity in young Wells.

扎卡里·戴维斯：另一个对威尔斯影响深远的因素是基督教。威尔斯的母亲非常虔诚，向年轻的威尔斯灌输了强烈的基督教福音派理念。

Sarah Cole: He had a lot of kind of religious language that he used towards his vision of a world state. He said that was a religion. He thought it was God. But in terms of organized religion as it existed, he saw himself as completely rejecting it. And he was always at odds with and in conflict with Catholics and other religious groups. So it's a legitimate-self story, because I do think there is something in those powerful narratives of massive destruction and massive worldwide spiritual renewal—that kind of forever eternal—renewal that stuck with him and helped to shape him.

萨拉·科尔：他吸收了很多宗教语言，用这些语言来表达他对世界国家的愿景。他说世界国家是一种宗教、是上帝。但他完全反对现有的宗教组织，因为他总是和天主教等其他宗教团体起冲突。这就是威尔斯之所以成为威尔斯的故事。我确实认为，在那些大规模的破坏和全球范围内永恒且大规模的精神洗涤中，有些东西触动并塑造了他。

Zachary Davis: Wells was a brilliant writer and thinker, but he shared many of the blind spots of his time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯是一位杰出的作家和思想家，但他也有许多那个时代特有的局限性。

Sarah Cole: Wells is not a saint. He is not perfect. Many of his beliefs are ones I find abhorrent. he is someone who thought about and espoused some theories. He was not a eugenicists, but there's a kind of eugenic worldview, especially some of his later works that are really unpalatable. And other things, as I mentioned, the lack of interesting thinking about women in the future and a sort of tendency, even though he thought of himself and was thought of as this big feminist, in fact, women seem to be pretty thinned out and kind of uninteresting and sort of subservient to larger male projects in a lot of his work.

萨拉·科尔：威尔斯不是圣人。他并不完美。他的许多理念我都很讨厌。他会思考、拥护一些理念，比如他虽然不是优生主义者，但作品里确实透露出了优生主义的世界观，特别是后来的一些作品，叫人无法接受。此外，就像我提到的，他对未来世界中女性的想象非常乏味。尽管他自认为是女性主义者，人们也这么看待他，但其实在他的很多作品中，女性都瘦弱、无趣，屈从于更大的男性主题。

Sarah Cole: You know, it isn't as if we've discovered someone who represents all of our values, but I think we're discovering someone who represents our interests and someone who was writing and speaking to a gigantic population in a way that gives us all different kinds of frictions and collaborations and back and forth that we just haven't seen.

萨拉·科尔：威尔斯并不能代表我们所有的价值观，但我觉得他代表了我们的利益，在为一个庞大的群体写作、说话，展现给我们各种各样从未见过的、来来回回的摩擦与合作。

Zachary Davis: Could you say a word about Wells' influence more broadly? You know, if you're going to talk about even if he's a little under-recognized, in what ways did he push ideas forward that we recognize today?

扎卡里·戴维斯：您能说说威尔斯还有哪些更广泛的影响吗？虽然说他有些被人们低估，但他在哪些方面让一些理念逐渐被今天的人们认可？

Sarah Cole: An interesting kind of contradiction in the place of Wells in the 20th  and 21st century is that he's not recognized in academia. He's not thought of as a major figure in any of the movements that we might think of as the central ones in literary and cultural studies in the 20th century. There's a lot of recovery that can be done. And not only I mean, I'm interested in him as a literary writer. I'm interested in the Time Machine as a novel and as part of the English and world literary tradition.

萨拉·科尔：威尔斯在20世纪和21世纪的地位有一个很矛盾的地方，那就是他在学术界不被认可。他不被认为是20世纪任何核心的文学、文化中的主要人物。在这一点上，还有很多可以探索。我不想仅仅把他看作文学作家，把《时间机器》看作一部小说、看作英国和世界文学传统的一部分。

Sarah Cole: But there are many other ways in which Wells can be thought about in big areas of Western thought and of intellectual history and of political history. So that's an act of neglect or that's a story of neglect and maybe recuperation, recuperation with all the caveats we recognize of his not being the exact hero that we might wish he could be in terms of some of his views and statements.

萨拉·科尔：还有其他许多视角，我们可以把威尔斯放到西方思想史和政治史这个大领域去思考。这是一个关于忽视和挖掘的故事。在挖掘的过程中，我们会发现他并不是我们想象中的英雄，至少就他的一些观点和声明而言，他并不是完完全全的英雄。

Sarah Cole: But the other side, the kind of weird contradiction with that, is his unbelievable influence in popular culture and his unbelievable resiliency in our collective fantasy life. He's everywhere and nowhere. And that is in some ways what makes him such an interesting figure is that combination. If we knew he was always everywhere, then that would have been thought about and written about and known and taught for so long. If he were just interesting but not influential, that would be fine, too. But it's really that combination of things.

萨拉·科尔：但另一方面，与此相矛盾的是，他在流行文化中有着令人惊叹的影响，在我们的集体幻想世界中有着难以置信的适应力。他无处不在。而这种矛盾的结合在某种程度上正是他如此有意思的原因。如果我们知道他无处不在，那么他就会被思考、被书写、被了解、被教导至今。如果他只是有趣，但没有影响力，那也说得过去。不过这几点确实都体现在了他一个人身上。

Zachary Davis: The Time Machine really kick-started science fiction as a distinct genre, a genre that is endlessly adaptable.

扎卡里·戴维斯：《时间机器》真正开辟了科幻小说这个独特的、可以不断改编的体裁。

Sarah Cole: All of these areas, I would say Wells' influence or his kind of the way he helped shape how we think it's very strong. So in terms of the text itself, there have been many iterations, films that are always popping up.

萨拉·科尔：威尔斯在所有这些领域都产生了巨大的影响，或是塑造了我们的思考方式。就这部小说来说，目前已经出了很多版，据此改编的电影也层出不穷。

Sarah Cole: There are all kinds of media adaptations, of course, comics and graphic novels and all kinds of things, novels written about Wells and time machines. There's a kind of meta quality of some of these works where Wells is in it and a time machine type of thing. So you get some of those. So that's a very rich category. So I would say that this story has itself been, you know, firmly established as one of the stalwarts in that kind of early science fiction and early time travel area.

萨拉·科尔：出现了各种媒体的改编，如漫画、图像小说以及关于威尔斯和时间机器的小说。其中一些作品很玄学，里面既有威尔斯，也有他笔下的时间机器。这是一个非常丰富的门类，这个故事本身已经彻底成为了早期科幻小说和早期时间旅行小说的典范之一。

Sarah Cole: But the story of the dream narrative that takes you somewhere else is an old one. And there are a lot of other ways that people got around time without a machine. But this is a watershed, I think.

萨拉·科尔：不过，通过梦境把你带到一个异世界，这样的故事非常古老。除了时间机器，人们还有很多其他方法来做时间旅行。但我觉得这部小说是个分水岭。

Zachary Davis: Wells is often compared to the French novelist Jules Verne who wrote adventure tales with some elements of science fiction.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯经常被拿来和法国小说家儒勒·凡尔纳相比较，后者的冒险小说中也有一些科幻元素。

Sarah Cole: But that sense of a kind of explosive discovery, in this case, the future in some alternate world which you have to accustom yourself to in which really organizes everything and reorganizes thought. That's very Wellsian. And I think that's very typical of how science fiction typically goes.

萨拉·科尔：但威尔斯式的科幻会给你一种爆炸性的发现，比如在《时间机器》中，他就把你扔进未来世界，叫你不得不适应着组织一切、重组思想。这是非常典型的科幻小说的做法。

Sarah Cole: And another thing I want to say about the sort of his influence and science fiction and the ways in which he does and doesn't act as a kind of key figure, one of the things that Wells figured out early on and that characterizes his stories—and again, this is a little different, I think, from Verne and from others—is that his idea is that you have one big change—the alternate thing, whether it's the fact of being in a certain future world or the way there are these, you know, another being that's in the world with you, whatever it might be, you've crossed into a different planetary structure or people are being made from animals or a man finds a machine to turn himself invisible.

萨拉·科尔：我还想谈谈他对科幻小说的另一个影响，谈谈他写科幻或者非科幻时候的一个特点。威尔斯的故事有个特点，这也是他不同于凡尔纳等人的地方。他常常会设计出一个巨大的变化、一个替代物。不论你是身处某个未来世界，或是和其他什么生物一起在这个世界中，要么你会穿越到一个不同的行星结构中，要么人会由动物重组而来的，要么会有一个人找到了一台机器，把自己变隐身了。

Sarah Cole: Whatever these things are, that's the only thing that changes. The whole world might look different, but the structures by which you navigate a world, the way in which things are oriented sort of cognitively remain the same. So these stories are quite lean in terms of the otherness that they imagine.

萨拉·科尔：不管这些东西是什么，那都是唯一变化的东西。整个世界可能看起来不同，但你应付世界的方式、认识事物的方向仍然是一样的。所以这些故事在想象的奇异程度方面都非常单薄。

Sarah Cole: He wants there to be a kind of one big twist or transformation. And that's what you adjust to learn from experience. It could be, too. But my point is it's not a packed world of difference. And I think that's part of what made his books so readable at the time. He called it “the domesticating of the fantastic”. And he was also called to give another term by his friend Conrad “the realist of the fantastic”. And again, there's that sense of kind of creating a world that is recognizable, that operates according to realist principles, but then has that fantastic element.

萨拉·科尔：他希望故事中有一个大的转折或转变，你可以适应着从中吸取经验。但在我看来，这并不是一个完全不同的世界。我觉得这也部分解释了为什么他的书在当时可读性这么高。他称这是“对魔幻世界的驯化”，他的朋友康拉德则用了另一个术语——“魔幻世界的现实主义者”。他想要创造一个能认得出的世界，这个世界按照现实主义原则运转，但又有魔幻元素。

Sarah Cole: It is also the yoking of these science, what we now call science fiction motifs with other big Western structures like the journey motif or exploration of another land, or an effort to kind of imagine and reconcile a basic problem in one's own culture, whether that's climate change or the cooling of the earth in his imagination at that time or class structure or war, so that there are big issues at stake and either in the settings or in the kind of para structure, and that we're trying to address those through thinking about these alternate possibilities or these weird other structures or narratives or spaces or experiences. So all of this play with reality is in the context of a variety of other ways in which people over time have written and thought about them.

萨拉·科尔：它也在科幻小说的主题中融入了其他大型的西方议题，比如旅行主题、探索另一片土地，或是努力想象、调和自己文化中的基本问题，不论这个问题是气候变化或想象中地球温度骤降，还是阶级结构或战争。不论这些问题出现在了整个小说背景中还是某个篇章段落中，它们都是有待解决的重大问题。我们则试图思考这些替代的可能性、这些奇怪的异质结构、叙述、空间或经验，从而解决这些问题。所有这些与现实的博弈都发生在这么多年来人们书写或想象的异世界里。

Zachary Davis: One of the great appeals of H.G. Wells’ stories is that they are so relatable for the reader. It is very easy to insert yourself into the story and go along for the adventure. The power of this relatable quality was seen most infamously in 1938 when American actor Orson Wells read an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of The Worlds live on the radio. During the hour-long broadcast, there were some listeners who tuned in part way through and didn’t know what was happening. Many listeners sincerely believed it was a breaking news program about a Martian army invading Earth.

扎卡里·戴维斯：H·G·威尔斯的故事的一大吸引力在于，读者读起来会觉得非常真实，很容易将自己代入到故事中，和主人公一起去冒险。这种真实感最集中地体现在一次朗读中。1938年，美国演员奥森·威尔斯在广播中现场朗读改编自威尔斯小说的广播剧《星际战争》。在长达一小时的广播中，一些听众在收听的过程中不知道发生了什么。许多听众真的相信这是一个火星军队入侵地球的突发新闻节目。

Sarah Cole: I think Wells was writing for the world. And there's a way in which his books are translatable, both in terms of language. It's very difficult to translate James Joyce. It's easier to translate H.G. Wells, and that's one reason why he's been so much translated. But it's also a translation in this other sense that these works really have that capacity to be reformulated for a different moment, a different place, a different time, a different problem. And they are and they have been. And the more the merrier. I mean, things accrue value and power and interest with each adaptation. And that's one of the nice things about something like the Time Machine or in that case, the War of the Worlds.

萨拉·科尔：我认为威尔斯在为整个世界而写作。无论从语言还是其他层面看，他的书都是完全可以翻译的。翻译詹姆斯·乔伊斯非常困难，但翻译H·G·威尔斯比较容易，这也是他被翻译成这么多语言的原因之一。从翻译角度看，他的作品的确可以在不同时刻、不同地方、不同情境下被重新叙述，从过去到现在都是如此。而且重述得越多越好。我的意思是，它们的价值、力量和趣味性随着每次改编而放大。这就是《时间机器》或《星际战争》这类作品的优势之一。

Zachary Davis: Wells wrote stories that have inspired generations of audiences, artists, filmmakers, and other writers around the world. He made science accessible and gave us a playground to imagine new, liberated realities.

扎卡里·戴维斯：威尔斯的故事激励了一代又一代的观众、艺术家、电影人和世界各地的其他作家。他让科学变得通俗易懂，给我们提供了一个想象无拘无束新现实的游乐之所。

Sarah Cole: There’s a reason why these books keep coming back over and over and over in film, in you know, all different media of all kinds, and inspire different generations of writers, thinkers and imaginers and have infused pop culture and continue unabated. I mean, last year long there was a new Invisible Man, there were three new War of the Worlds, and there are always a Time Machine. The Time Machine got us thinking, it got us thinking about the future, it got us thinking about time. It got us thinking about how human beings, how humanity exist within long spans of time and why that matters and how we might imagine it. And these are kind of human projects that preceded Wells. But he offered something that was transformative for those kinds of questions.

萨拉·科尔：这些故事不断出现在电影等各种媒体中，激励了一代又一代的作家、思想家和想象家，渗入到流行文中，这种趋势还有增无减。去年又出了一版新的《隐身人》、三版新的《星际战争》和意料之中的一版新的《时间机器》。至于原因，我想是因为，《时间机器》让我们思考未来和时间，思考人类如何在漫长的时间中生存，思考为什么这很重要，以及思考可以如何想象它。这些关于人类的探讨虽然在威尔斯之前就有，但他提供了一些新的元素，对思考这些问题起到了变革性的作用。

Zachary Davis: Writ Large is a production of Ximalaya. Writ Large is produced by Jack Pombriant, Liza French, and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Feiran Du, Ariel Liu, and Monica Zhang. Our theme song is by Ian Coss. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe today in the Ximalaya app. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

扎卡里·戴维斯：本节目由喜马拉雅独家制作播出。感谢您的收听，我们下期再见！