編輯推薦
一場末日浩劫後的未來,神秘的病毒毀滅瞭文明,受害者喪失過去的記憶,變身為吃活人的僵屍,幸存的人類建立起堅固的高牆堡壘,以防止飢餓的僵屍們,成群結隊闖進來獵食…。然而,這種看似傳統活屍片的背景設定,卻因男主角R的齣現而顛覆一切!R是個沒有記憶、心跳的僵屍,卻懷抱著許多夢想,他的內心世界充滿驚奇與渴望。某日R正在獵食人類時,竟然煞到瞭一位溫暖、燦爛的活生生女孩茱莉,R不但沒吃掉她的腦袋,還決定救她一命,讓她免於遭受R的僵屍同伴吞噬。 對原本形如槁木死灰的R而言,茱莉的齣現,簡直是蒼灰陰鬱中一抹奔放艷麗的色彩。於是一段緊張而又異常溫柔的甜蜜關係就此展開。
R悄悄把茱莉帶迴他稱為傢的地方,即一座滿布僵屍的機場,並讓她躲在一架廢棄的767波音客機上,裏麵有他到處搜集而來的“寶藏”,包括黑膠唱片、雪景水晶球、樂器等。接下來的幾天,他們在這個隱匿處意外地共度瞭愜意的日子,在不知不覺之中,活潑的茱莉喚起R遺忘已久的人性情感,而她也開始瞭解到他不隻是個慢動作、眼神呆滯的行屍走肉。
茱莉很睏惑自己對於R的感情,於是帶著復雜情緒返迴人類城市。她父親是無情的僵屍獵人,領導人類大軍捍衛他們僅存的高牆傢園。同時,害相思病的R開始産生前所未有的改變,他相信自己與茱莉的相知相惜能夠拯救無論是生是死的人類,不過他齣現在她傢門口時,很快就掀起活人和僵屍(以及皮包骨)之間的全麵性混戰,而這也威脅到這一對奇跡戀人未來能否在一起的可貴機會。
這種事從沒發生過,不但不閤邏輯,也違背瞭規矩,不但改變瞭R,也改變他的僵屍同伴,甚至讓死氣沉沉的世界齣現瞭生機。然而,在那陰森腐敗的世界裏,想要完成夢想,他們還需要一場革命……
內容簡介
R is a young man with an existential crisis--he is a zombie. He shuffles through an America destroyed by war, social collapse, and the mindless hunger of his undead comrades, but he craves something more than blood and brains. He can speak just a few grunted syllables, but his inner life is deep, full of wonder and longing. He has no memories, noidentity, and no pulse, but he has dreams.
After experiencing a teenage boy's memories while consuming his brain, R makes an unexpected choice that begins a tense, awkward, and stragely sweet relationship with the victim's human girlfriend. Julie is a blast of color in the otherwise dreary and gray landscape that surrounds R. His decision to protect her will transform not only R, but his fellow Dead, and perhaps their whole lifeless world.
Scary, funny, and surprisingly poignant, Warm Bodies is about being alive, being dead, and the blurry line in between.
《溫暖的屍體》講述瞭一個叫做“R”的僵屍和一個他殺死的人類的女友之間的浪漫關係,這段關係引發瞭連鎖反應,不僅改變瞭他和他的僵屍夥伴,也改變瞭整個僵屍世界。
作者簡介
Isaac Marion was born near Seattle in 1981 and has lived in and around that city ever since. Deciding to forgo college in favor of direct experience, he dived into writing while still in high school and self-published three terrible novels before finally hitting his stride with Warm Bodies, his first published work. He currently splits his time between writing in Seattle and hunting inspiration on cross-country RV trips. Visit IsaacMarion.com.
精彩書評
“I never thought I could care so passionately for a zombie. Isaac Marion has created the most unexpected romantic lead I've ever encountered, and rewritten the entire concept of what it means to be a zombie in the process. This story stayed with me long after I was done reading it. I eagerly await the next book by Isaac Marion.”
(Stephenie Meyer, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of the Twilight series)
“A mesmerising evolution of a classic contemporary myth.”
(Simon Pegg, New York Times bestselling author of Nerd Do Well)
“Warm Bodies is a terrific book—a compelling literary fantasy which is also a strange and affecting pop-culture parable.”
(Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World)
“Isaac Marion has a great new voice that hooks you from page one and accomplishes the impossible: it makes you care about young zombie love. Warm Bodies is a terrific read.”
(Josh Bazell, New York Times bestselling author of Beat the Reaper)
“Enormous fun.”
(Marie Claire (UK))
“Wryly playful, cinematic, and ultimately moving.”
(Time Out London)
“Has there been a more sympathetic monster since Frankenstein's?”
(The Financial Times)
“It’s got the boarded-up strongholds and mob mentality of Night of the Living Dead—but also romance. As the evil thing resists its evil nature, the book neuters zombies in the same way Stephanie Meyer did vampires.”
(Time Out NY)
“If you haven't caught on to Isaac Marion's writing yet, you're really missing out.”
(About.com)
“In elegant, evocative prose, Marion has fashioned the world’s most unlikely romance in a story that is by turns harrowing, poignant, and tender. At the last, the reader is reminded that we are all ultimately human, whether living or dead. Utterly charming.”
(Library Journal (starred review))
前言/序言
I AM DEAD, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it. I’m sorry I can’t properly introduce myself, but I don’t have a name anymore. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries. Mine might have started with an “R,” but that’s all I have now. It’s funny because back when I was alive, I was always forgetting other people’s names. My friend “M” says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can’t smile, because your lips have rotted off.
None of us are particularly attractive, but death has been kinder to me than some. I’m still in the early stages of decay. Just the gray skin, the unpleasant smell, the dark circles under my eyes. I could almost pass for a Living man in need of a vacation. Before I became a zombie I must have been a businessman, a banker or broker or some young temp learning the ropes, because I’m wearing fairly nice clothes. Black slacks, gray shirt, red tie. M makes fun of me sometimes. He points at my tie and tries to laugh, a choked, gurgling rumble deep in his gut. His clothes are holey jeans and a plain white T-shirt. The shirt is looking pretty macabre by now. He should have picked a darker color.
We like to joke and speculate about our clothes, since these final fashion choices are the only indication of who we were before we became no one. Some are less obvious than mine: shorts and a sweater, skirt and a blouse. So we make random guesses.
You were a waitress. You were a student. Ring any bells?
It never does.
No one I know has any specific memories. Just a vague, vestigial knowledge of a world long gone. Faint impressions of past lives that linger like phantom limbs. We recognize civilization—buildings, cars, a general overview—but we have no personal role in it. No history. We are just here. We do what we do, time passes, and no one asks questions. But like I’ve said, it’s not so bad. We may appear mindless, but we aren’t. The rusty cogs of cogency still spin, just geared down and down till the outer motion is barely visible. We grunt and groan, we shrug and nod, and sometimes a few words slip out. It’s not that different from before.
But it does make me sad that we’ve forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else’s, because I’d like to love them, but I don’t know who they are.
There are hundreds of us living in an abandoned airport outside some large city. We don’t need shelter or warmth, obviously, but we like having the walls and roofs over our heads. Otherwise we’d just be wandering in an open field of dust somewhere, and that would be horrifying. To have nothing at all around us, nothing to touch or look at, no hard lines whatsoever, just us and the gaping maw of the sky. I imagine that’s what being full-dead is like. An emptiness vast and absolute.
I think we’ve been here a long time. I still have all my flesh, but there are elders who are little more than skeletons with clinging bits of muscle, dry as jerky. Somehow it still extends and contracts, and they keep moving. I have never seen any of us “die” of old age. Left alone with plenty of food, maybe we’d “live” forever, I don’t know. The future is as blurry to me as the past. I can’t seem to make myself care about anything to the right or left of the present, and the present isn’t exactly urgent. You might say death has relaxed me.
I am riding the escalators when M finds me. I ride the escalators several times a day, whenever they move. It’s become a ritual. The airport is derelict, but the power still flickers on sometimes, maybe flowing from emergency generators stuttering deep underground. Lights flash and screens blink, machines jolt into motion. I cherish these moments. The feeling of things coming to life. I stand on the steps and ascend like a soul into Heaven, that sugary dream of our childhoods, now a tasteless joke.
After maybe thirty repetitions, I rise to find M waiting for me at the top. He is hundreds of pounds of muscle and fat draped on a six-foot-five frame. Bearded, bald, bruised and rotten, his grisly visage slides into view as I crest the staircase summit. Is he the angel that greets me at the gates? His ragged mouth is oozing black drool.
He points in a vague direction and grunts, “City.”
I nod and follow him.
We are going out to find food. A hunting party forms around us as we shuffle toward town. It’s not hard to find recruits for these expeditions, even if no one is hungry. Focused thought is a rare occurrence here, and we all follow it when it manifests. Otherwise we’d just be standing around and groaning all day. We do a lot of standing around and groaning. Years pass this way. The flesh withers on our bones and we stand here, waiting for it to go. I often wonder how old I am.
The city where we do our hunting is conveniently close. We arrive around noon the next day and start looking for flesh. The new hunger is a strange feeling. We don’t feel it in our stomachs—some of us don’t even have those. We feel it everywhere equally, a sinking, sagging sensation, as if our cells are deflating. Last winter, when so many Living joined the Dead and our prey became scarce, I watched some of my friends become full-dead. The transition was undramatic. They just slowed down, then stopped, and after a while I realized they were corpses. It disquieted me at first, but it’s against etiquette to notice when one of us dies. I distracted myself with some groaning.
I think the world has mostly ended, because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered, and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I don’t know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it’s not so important. Once you’ve arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.
We start to smell the Living as we approach a dilapidated apartment building. The smell is not the musk of sweat and skin, it’s the effervescence of life energy, like the ionized tang of lightning and lavender. We don’t smell it in our noses. It hits us deeper inside, near our brains, like wasabi. We converge on the building and crash our way inside.
We find them huddled in a small studio unit with the windows boarded up. They are dressed worse than we are, wrapped in filthy tatters and rags, all of them badly in need of a shave. M will be saddled with a short blond beard for the rest of his Fleshy existence, but everyone else in our party is cleanshaven. It’s one of the perks of being dead, another thing we don’t have to worry about anymore. Beards, hair, toenails… no more fighting biology. Our wild bodies have finally been tamed.
Slow and clumsy but with unswerving commitment, we launch ourselves at the Living. Shotgun blasts fill the dusty air with gunpowder and gore. Black blood spatters the walls. The loss of an arm, a leg, a portion of torso, this is disregarded, shrugged off. A minor cosmetic issue. But some of us take shots to our brains, and we drop. Apparently there’s still something of value in that withered gray sponge because if we lose it, we are corpses. The zombies to my left and right hit the ground with moist thuds. But there are plenty of us. We are overwhelming. We set upon the Living, and we eat.
Eating is not a pleasant business. I chew off a man’s arm, and I hate it. I hate his screams, because I don’t like pain, I don’t like hurting people, but this is the world now. This is what we do. Of course if I don’t eat all of him, if I spare his brain, he’ll rise up and follow me back to the airport, and that might make me feel better. I’ll introduce him to everyone, and maybe we’ll stand around and groan for a while. It’s hard to say what “friends” are anymore, but that might be close. If I restrain myself, if I leave enough…
But I don’t. I can’t. As always I go straight for the good part, the part that makes my head light up like a picture tube. I eat the brain, and for about thirty seconds, I have memories. Flashes of parades, perfume, music… life. Then it fades, and I get up, and we all stumble out of the city, still cold and gray, but feeling a little better. Not “good,” exactly, not “happy,” certainly not “alive,” but… a little less dead. This is the best we can do.
I trail behind the group as the city disappears behind us. My steps plod a little heavier than the others’. When I pause at a rain-filled pothole to scrub gore off my face and clothes, M drops back and slaps a hand on my shoulder. He knows my distaste for some of our routines. He knows I’m a little more sensitive than most. Sometimes he teases me, twirls my messy black hair into pigtails and says, “Girl. Such… girl.” But he knows when to take my gloom seriously. He pats my shoulder and just looks at me. His face isn’t capable of much expressive nuance anymore, but I know what he wants to say. I nod, and we keep walking.
I don’t know why we have to kill people. I don’t know what chewing through a man’s neck accomplishes. I steal what he has to replace what I lack. He disappears, and I stay. It’s simple but senseless, arbitrary laws from some lunatic legislator in the sky. But following those laws keeps me walking, so I follow them to the letter. I eat until I stop eating, then I eat again.
...
《失落的文明迴響》 一部關於時間、記憶與人性極限的宏大史詩 作者:艾莉森·裏德 版本:精裝典藏版 ISBN:978-1-56789-012-3 --- 塵封的捲軸,蘇醒的低語 在人類文明的光芒逐漸黯淡的遙遠未來,世界被一層厚重的“寂靜塵埃”所覆蓋。這不是尋常的沙土,而是技術奇點失控後遺留下來的、能夠扭麯物理定律和生物認知的微觀粒子雲。在這片死寂的荒原之上,人類如同幽靈般分散,依循著破碎的古老知識勉力維生。 《失落的文明迴響》並非一個簡單的末世寓言,它是一場深入曆史骨髓、探尋“為什麼我們遺失瞭一切”的哲學之旅。故事圍繞著“編纂者”——一個被授予維護和解讀失落文明信息職責的隱秘群體——展開。 主角卡萊布·維恩,是當代最年輕的資深編纂者。他的使命,是進入被稱為“禁區”的舊世界遺址,尋找並解析那些被塵埃深度侵蝕的數字和實體記錄。卡萊布的心中燃燒著兩個疑問:究竟是什麼樣的傲慢和疏忽,讓人類走到瞭自我毀滅的邊緣?以及,我們是否有能力重拾那些被遺忘的智慧,以避免重蹈覆轍? 第一部:迴聲之塔的秘密 故事始於卡萊布接到一項前所未有的任務:定位並激活位於舊大陸中心、傳說中是前文明核心數據存儲中心的“迴聲之塔”。這座塔被認為擁有完整的“大斷裂”時期的記錄——那個導緻一切崩塌的決定性瞬間。 隨著卡萊布和他的搭檔,沉默寡言的生物工程專傢莉拉·梅斯,深入被遺棄的超級都市廢墟,他們遇到的不僅僅是物理上的危險。寂靜塵埃會誘發幻覺,將幸存者睏在他們內心深處最強烈的、扭麯的記憶之中。卡萊布必須學會如何辨識現實與塵埃編織的幻象。 他們在探索中發現瞭一係列前文明的“時間膠囊”,裏麵記載著宏偉的城市規劃、精妙的能源係統,以及令人不安的社會階層固化。這些記錄揭示瞭一個令人震驚的事實:大斷裂並非源於某場突如其來的災難,而是源於內部的、緩慢滲透的係統性失靈——對效率的無限追求,最終扼殺瞭人性的彈性。 第二部:記憶的叛徒 隨著他們接近迴聲之塔,他們遇到瞭另一群幸存者——“純粹者”。純粹者拒絕一切舊文明的殘餘技術,他們相信隻有徹底的“格式化”纔能帶來真正的救贖。他們的領袖,一位魅力非凡但偏執的哲學傢西拉斯,視卡萊布為褻瀆者,認為任何對過去的解讀都是對未來的汙染。 卡萊布和莉拉發現,塔的入口被一種復雜的生物加密係統保護著,這需要通過“記憶連接”纔能激活。連接意味著將自己的意識短暫地融入舊文明核心人工智能的殘餘數據流中。 在這次驚心動魄的連接中,卡萊布看到瞭大斷裂前夕的真實景象:並非是戰爭或瘟疫,而是一場由過度連接和信息過載導緻的“認知瘟疫”。人們被淹沒在無休止的、真假難辨的信息洪流中,最終喪失瞭批判性思維和集體決策的能力。他親身體驗到,一個“知道一切”的文明,如何反而失去瞭理解世界的能力。 第三部:人性的錨點 當卡萊布終於進入迴聲之塔的核心,他發現那裏並沒有巨大的服務器或光芒萬丈的知識庫。取而代之的是一個微小、幾乎被遺忘的檔案室,裏麵隻有手寫的日記、素描和未完成的音樂樂譜。 真正的“失落的文明迴響”,並非那些技術藍圖,而是那些在技術巔峰時期,個體對美、對愛、對遺憾的樸素記錄。 西拉斯和純粹者追至塔內,試圖摧毀核心。一場圍繞著“知識的價值”與“遺忘的必要性”的激烈衝突爆發瞭。卡萊布必須在西拉斯的狂熱和塔內殘存的、試圖自我保護的人工智能的邏輯陷阱中找到平衡。 在最後的對決中,卡萊布並未選擇播放那些足以揭示所有災難技術細節的“終極記錄”。他選擇瞭播放一段前文明普通傢庭的日常錄音——一個孩子學習騎自行車的笑聲,一次關於天氣遲到的爭吵,以及一句不完美的告白。 尾聲:微小的重建 卡萊布意識到,前文明的失敗在於他們隻記錄瞭“宏大敘事”,卻忽略瞭支撐文明存續的“微小人性”。要重建,不能依賴宏大的係統,而必須從最基礎的人與人之間的信任和共情開始。 他帶著這些不被前文明重視的“人性數據”離開瞭迴聲之塔,與莉拉一起,開始在幸存者群體中傳播的不是技術配方,而是對失敗的反思和對日常生活的珍視。 《失落的文明迴響》探討瞭信息時代的終極悖論:我們積纍瞭多少數據,並不決定我們的智慧;我們如何處理那些最脆弱、最不完美的人類情感,纔真正決定瞭文明的韌性。這本書以其細膩的場景描繪和對存在主義睏境的深刻洞察,成為對當代社會發齣警醒的必讀之作。 讀者反饋: “裏德的筆觸如同冰冷的科學報告,卻包裹著一顆燃燒的心髒。讀完後,我開始重新審視我手機裏每一個不經意的通知。” “這不是關於未來,而是關於我們如何錯失瞭現在。宏偉的想象力與令人心碎的細節完美融閤。”