經典科幻文學:《 再見 多謝你們的魚》序章

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is her story.

在遙遠的銀河系西旋臂那毫不時髦的末端上一塊毫不爲圖所注的毫無生氣的地方有一顆小小的毫不引人注目的黃色恆星。
大約在九千二百萬英里外環繞着它的是一顆完全可以被無視的渺小的藍綠色星球，上面的猿類生物是如此驚人地原始以至於他們仍然認爲電子錶是個相當精妙的玩意兒。
這個星球有——或者應該說是曾經有——一個問題，問題是這樣的：大多數人在大多數時間裏都處於一種鬱悶的狀態。對於這一問題有很多解決方案，但大多數方案都跟一種小小的綠色紙片的動向有密切關係，這點很詭異，因爲大體上來講並不是那些綠色紙片在鬱悶。
因此這一問題繼續遺留了下來；很多人都非常不爽，其中大多數人都相當悲哀，即便是有電子錶的傢伙。很多人越來越贊同這樣的觀點：他們當初首先從樹上下來實在是個大錯誤。並且甚至有些人覺得進化到樹上都是一步臭棋，沒有任何東西應該離開可親可敬的海洋母親。
於是，在一個星期四（大約是一個人被釘在樹上之後的兩千年，那個人宣稱如果改變一下，與人爲善，世界原來可以更美），一個女孩獨自坐在瑞克曼斯沃斯（注）的一個小咖啡館，突然意識到這麼長時間以來到底是那兒出了岔子，她終於明白了這個世界究竟怎樣才能變成一個美好幸福的地方。這一次這個主意很妥當，一定能奏效，而且沒有人會因此被釘到什麼東西上。
然而，悲哀的是，在她能夠打電話告訴任何人這一事情之前，一個愚蠢得可怕的災難發生了，這一主意永遠地消失了。
這就是她的故事。