翻译：

有时，你脑海只有一个模糊的概念，很多年之后才会想明白故事应该从何着手。通常，你必须等这个半成形的概念与别的点子融合，然后灵感才会迸发。

这就是“Zima Blue”的创作过程，也是本书中第二篇Carrie Clay的故事。我一直想写关于机器人的故事，故事中的机器人经过许多世纪的代代相传成了传家宝，随着时间的流逝，它变得越来越聪明，越来越精细，我知道艾萨克·阿西莫夫（Isaac Asimov）已经在他的长篇小说《双百人》(《The Bicentennial Man》) 中‘用过’了这个概念，但科幻小说真正令人愉悦的是，它所涉及的远不止是新概念，更在于寻找新的角度去理解已有的概念，你要做的就是找到自己的理解角度，用新的叙述方式，阐明新的道理，不用说，这部分是最困难的。

'Zima Blue'被我搁置了很多年，直至我找到另一半——全新的阐述角度。期间我试图通过游泳来理清思绪，不经意间想通了其中关键。

游泳池真是个好地方。

由于'Zima Blue'讲的是记忆的易错性，因此唯有记录下我自己对文中一件轶事的不确定性，才算合情合理。我提到了这样一个故事，一个男人拼命寻找童年时见过的某种蓝色，后来在自然历史博物馆的一只甲虫身上找到了这个颜色。这件事发生在神经学家奥利弗·萨克斯（Oliver Sacks）身上：至少我记得他在电视节目中谈论过类似的事情，如果我记错了细节，我很抱歉…但我只想重申我对萨克斯作品的热爱，以及我在阅读他的个人履历时，经历的惊叹以及敬畏之情。如果科幻小说不存在于这个宇宙，那么萨克斯的著作将非常有效地填补这一空白。

注：

1. 《Zima Blue》收录于Alastair Reynolds的小说集《Zima Blue and other stories》

2. 《双百人》是美国作家艾萨克·阿西莫夫的小说，获得了1976年雨果奖和星云奖的最佳科幻小说。

3. 奥利弗·萨克斯（Oliver Sacks），英国伦敦著名脑神经学家，擅长以纪实文学的形式，充满人文关怀的笔触，将脑神经病人的临床案例写成深刻感人的故事，他在医学和文学领域均享有盛誉，被《纽约时报》誉为“医学桂冠诗人”。

原文：

Sometimes you have half an idea for a story that you hold in your head for years before you know what to do with it. Typically, you have to wait for the moment when that half-formed idea intersects with another one and the mental fireworks go off.

That's how it was with 'Zima Blue', the second Carrie Clay story that appears in this book. I'd long wanted to write a story about a robot that had become a kind of family heirloom, passed from owner to owner across many generations and centuries, with the robot becoming cleverer and more sophisticated as time goes by. I was well aware that the idea had been 'done' by Isaac Asimov in his long story 'The Bicentennial Man'. But one of the truly delightful things about science fiction is that it is far less about new ideas than it is about finding new ways to think about old ones. All you have to do is find a new spin, a new way of telling, a new truth to illuminate. Which, needless to say, is the difficult part. 'Zima Blue' sat on the back burner for years until I got the other half of the story, the new angle of attack. And I got it while taking a swim to clear my mind of the problems I was having coming up with story ideas.

Good things, swimming pools.

Since 'Zima Blue' is about the fallibility of memory, it's only fitting that I should record my own uncertainty about an anecdote in the story. Mention is made of a man who searched despairingly for a particular shade of the colour blue glimpsed in childhood, and who later finds it in the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. I think something like this happened to the neurologist Oliver Sacks: at least, I remember him talking about something very like it in a television programme. If I've misremembered the details, I apologise . . . but I can only restate my enthusiasm for Sacks' writings, and the many moments of jaw-dropping awe I've experienced in reading his . If science fiction did not exist in this universe, the writings of Sacks would fill the gap pretty effectively.

———Alastair Reynolds