冰菓雪喵团

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Four years ago, after a Christmas Lunch, my younger brother passed around a very small ‘book’ of four stapled-together pages that he said he’d found while helping my mother clean out a storage area under the family home. The book contained four stories written in shaky capital letters, with a couple of half-hearted illustrations done with colored pencils. On the front, it had“Stories” and “Garth Nix” in the handwriting one would expect from someone aged around six. 

四年前，在一次圣诞聚餐后，我弟弟递给我一个由订书钉固定起来的四页“本子”。他说，这是在帮我妈妈一起清理大宅的地下贮藏室时找到的。这个本子里有四个小故事，全部是用抖抖索索的大写字母写成的，里面还有彩色铅笔画出的一对半个心形图案。在页首处，上面写着“故事集”和“加思·尼克斯”的字样，这字看来就像一个大约六岁的小男孩写出来的。

The stories included such gems as “The Coin Shower,” which was very short and went something like:  

a boy went outside

it started raining coins

he picked them up

这些故事有着如“硬币雨”这样的标题，是个很短的故事，大意是这样的：

一个小男孩走了出去

天上下起了硬币雨

他把硬币捡了起来

I had no memory of this story or the little booklet, and at first I thought it had been fabricated by my brother as a joke, but my parents remembered me writing the stories and engaging in this bit of self-publishing at an early age.

无论是对这些故事、还是对这本小册子，我都一点印象也没有了。所以起先我还觉得会不会是我弟弟仿制出来开我玩笑的，但我父母还记得我写下这些故事、并试图自行出版的往事。

I wrote “The Coin Shower” and the other stories in that collection about thirty-five years ago, and I’ve been writing ever since. Not always fiction, though. In my varied writing career I’ve written all kinds of things, from speeches for CEOs to brochures about brickworks to briefing papers on new Internet technologies.

大约三十五年前，我在小册子里写下了“硬币雨”等故事，时至今日，我还在继续写作。当然，并不总是写小说。在我多样化的写作生涯里，我写过各种各样的稿子。比如给总经理的演讲稿、关于砌砖的说明手册，以及关于最新网络科技的简介等等。

I first got into print writing articles and scenarios for the role-playing games “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Traveler” when I was sixteen or seventeen. I wrote for magazines like Multiverse and Breakout! in Australia and White Dwarf in the United Kingdom. I tried to crack D r a g o n magazine in the United States, but never quite managed to sell them anything.

我十六七岁时第一次下笔写付印的文字和场景描述，是为角色扮演游戏“龙与地下城”和“旅行者”写的。我曾为一些杂志，如澳洲的“多重世界脱逃”和英国的《白矮人》杂志撰稿。我试过在美国推广龙系列杂志，但也没能真的卖出过什么。

This minor success in getting role-playing game articles or scenarios into print led me to try my hand at getting some of my fiction published. I’d written quite a few stories here and there without success, but when I was nineteen years old, I wrote a whole lot more while I was traveling around the U.K. and Europe, broadening my horizons. I drove all over the place in a beat-up Austin 1600 with a small metal Silver-Reed typewriter in the backseat, a couple of notebooks, and lots of other people’s books. Every day I’d write something in longhand in my notebook, and then that night or perhaps the next morning I’d type up what I’d written. (That established a writing practice that has continued for more than twenty years: I write most of my novels in longhand, typing up each chapter on the computer after I’ve got the first draft done in the latest black-and-red notebook. I now have more than twenty of these notebooks, plus one very out-of-place blue-and-white-striped notebook that I turned to during the stationery drought of 1996.)

在创作角色扮演游戏故事和场景说明上取得的小小成功令我得以鼓起勇气试着发表自己写的几部小说。我写过几篇未被发表的故事，但在我19岁那年，在我游历英伦和欧陆期间，我写下了很多作品，这段经历令我得以拓宽视野。我开着一台老旧的奥斯汀1600到处游历，车的后座上放着一台银苇牌打字机、笔记本和很多书。每天我都会在笔记本里手写一些内容，而后在晚上或次日早晨，我会把我写下的东西打印出来（这也催生出了一个我坚持了20多年的写作实践模式：我会先把我的小说的大部分内容写下来，当我的初稿在我的红黑笔记本上成形后，再把每一章的内容转录到电脑上。我有超过20个这样的笔记本，还有一个不太合用的蓝白线条笔记本，这是我1996年陷入办公用品饥荒时使用的）。

I don’t write everything in longhand first, though; sometimes I just take to the keyboard. Most of my short fiction begins with handwritten notes, and perhaps a few key sentences put down with my trusty Waterman fountain pen, but then I start typing. The pen comes into its own again later, when I print out the story, make my changes and corrections, and then go back to the computer. This process often occurs when I have only part of the story written. I quite often revise the first third or some small part of a story six or seven times before I’ve written the rest of it. Often the revision occurs because I have left the story incomplete for a long time, and I need to revisit the existing part in order to feel my way into the story again.

我也不会把什么都先手写出来，有时候我就直接用电脑开写了。我的大多数短篇小说都始于手写的笔记，然后我也许会用我可靠的威迪文钢笔写下一些关键句，接着，我就开始用电脑打字了。钢笔随后又会派上用场，当我把故事打印出来后，我会用笔标出需修改和纠错之处，然后我再用电脑编辑。通常，只在我的小说需要小规模修改时，我才会这样做。我常常会修改个六到七次我的小说的前三分之一内容，然后才会写完余下部分。需要反复修改的原因通常是因为我把半成品的小说放置太久了，所以有必要重读已写完的部分来再次进入我的小说中。

Both my short and long fiction works usually begin with a thinly sketched scene, character, situation, or some combination of all three, which just appears in my head. For example, I might suddenly visualize a huge old mill by a broad river, the wheel slowly turning, with the sound of the grinding stones underlaid by the burble of the river. Or I might think of a character, say a middle-aged man who has turned away from the sorcery of his youth because he is afraid of it, but who will be forced to embrace it again. Or a situation might emerge from my subconscious, in which a man, or something that was once a man, is looking down on a group of travelers from a rocky perch, wondering whether he/it should rob them.

我的短篇或长篇小说通常开篇于我脑中想出的一个简单勾勒的场景、人物和事件，或这三者的杂糅。比如，我可能会想象出坐落在一条大河边的大而古老的磨坊，磨臼轮子缓缓转动着，磨石的声音自汩汩水流声之下传来。我也许会想象一个人物，例如一个中年男子，他年轻的时候被男巫驱逐了，因为他害怕巫术的力量，但他会被迫重拾旧技。有时一个场景会从我的潜意识里浮现出来，在那里，一个人，或一个曾经是人的造物，从一块高高的岩石上俯视着一群旅行者，寻思着要不要袭击他们。

All these beginnings might come together into the story of a miller, once a sorcerer, who is transformed into a creature as the result of a magical compact he thought he had evaded. So he must leave his settled life and become a brigand, in the hope of finding, on one of the magicians or priests he robs on the road, the one item of magical apparatus that can return his human shape.

所有这些片段最后可能会演化成一个完整的故事。一个过去当过男巫的磨坊主被迫签下了契约，令他转换为某种魔法造物，重回他以为自己已逃离的老路上去。所以他不得不放弃自己安逸的生活做个土匪，期望着能在他打劫一位魔法师或神父时，可以找到特定的魔导器让自己恢复人形。

Or they might not come together. I have numerous notes for stories, and many partly begun stories, that have progressed no further. Some of these fragments might be used in my novels, or at least be the seeds of some elements in one. A few ideas will progress and grow and become stories, complete in themselves. The great majority of my jotted-down ideas, images, and scraps of writing will never become anything more than a few lines in a black-and-red notebook.

不过有时候却并非如此。我为写作做过无数的笔记，其中一部分变成了故事的开头，但却无疾而终了。有一些细节可能会用在我的小说里，或者至少成为了催生情节发展的元素。有一些片段会自然的发展起来，成为了一个完整的故事呈现出来。所有这些我随手写下的剧情点、场景或情节描述最后也只会汇聚成我的黑红笔记本上的寥寥数行而已。

The stories in this collection are the ones that got past the notes stage, that became a few paragraphs, then a few pages, and somehow charged on downhill to become complete. They represent a kind of core sample taken through more than fifteen years of writing, from the callow author of twenty-five who wrote “Down to the Scum Quarter” to the possibly more polished forty-one-year-old writer of “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case.”

这些被收入笔记本的故事先是跨过了笔记阶段，然后扩充成段，再变为数页，最后经过或多或少的修改完善成为一个完整的故事。以上这些就是我十五年来的写作时的通常流程，经由此，当年那个羽翼未丰、写下了《走向败类广场》的二十五岁作家成为了现在的我——经过了千锤百炼的、写下了《尼古拉斯·塞尔和箱中怪物》的这个四十五岁的作家。

Fortunately, you have been spared some even earlier efforts, including the heavily T. H. White–influenced short story I published in my school magazine at fifteen, and even my very first professional short story sale, which felt like a great triumph for me at nineteen years old but now looks rather out of place with my later works.

不过好在，在这里我们省略了一些我的早期历程，包括在特伦斯·韩伯瑞·怀特的深刻影响下写出的短篇小说——在我十五岁的时候发表在校刊上。甚至包括我最初发表并售出的职业作品，对那年十九岁的我而言，这真是一项大成就。但以我近期作品的标准看，那些拙作都太稚嫩了。

I hope you find some stories here that you will enjoy, or wonder about, or that lingeruncomfortably in the mind when you wish they didn’t. But if your favorite story is “The Coin Shower,” please do not write and tell me that my writing has been going downhill ever since I was six.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Garth Nix

我希望你能从这本书里找到你喜欢的故事，但倘若你没有，我也会有点遗憾的。不过，如果碰巧你最喜欢的故事是那篇《硬币雨》，也请不要写信告诉我，我的写作从六岁开始就已经在走下坡路了。

                                                                                                  加思·尼克斯

End of Perface

* T. H. White：Terence Hanbury White，英国作家和诗人、中世纪文学译者和编辑。生于英属印度时期的孟买，在由美国返回英国的航船旅途中逝世。怀特毕业于剑桥大学皇后学院，曾在白金汉郡担任教职，后隐居于英国乡间专职写作；他研究15世纪亚瑟王传说，编写《永恒之王》（The Once and Future King）四部曲，其中最著名的《石中剑》（The Sword in the Stone）曾由迪士尼改编为同名动画电影。

Reference:

Nix, Garth. (2005). Across the Wall: Tales of the Old Kingdom and elsewhere. Crows: Allen & Unwin