2009-203考研英语一 翻译 模拟.docVIP

2009 Part C 　　There is no question that science-fiction writers have become more ambitious, stylistically and thematically, in recent years. (46) But this may have less to do with the luring call of academic surroundings than with changing market conditions-a factor that academic critics rarely take into account. Robert Silverberg, a former president of The Science Fiction Writers of America, is one of the most prolific professionals in a field dominated by people who actually write for a living. (Unlike mystery or Western writers, most science-fiction writers cannot expect to cash in on fat movie sales or TV tie-ins.) (47) Still in his late thirties, Silverberg has published more than a hundred books, and he is disarmingly frank about the relationship between the quality of genuine prose and the quality of available outlet. By his own account, he was an annoyingly verbal young man from Brooklyn who picked up his first science-fiction book at the age of ten, started writing seriously at the age of thirteen, and at seventeen nearly gave up in despair over his inability to break into the pulp magazines. (48) At his parents urging, he enrolled in Columbia University, so that, if worst came to worst, he could always go to the School of Journalism and get a nice steady job somewhere. During his sophomore year, he sold his first science-fiction story to a Scottish magazine named Nebula. By the end of his junior year, he had sold a novel and twenty more stories. (49) By the end of his senior year, he was earning two hundred dollars a week writing science fiction, and his parents were reconciled to his pursuit of the literary life. I became very cynical very quickly, he says. First I couldnt sell anything, then I could sell everything. The market played to my worst characteristics. An editor of a schlock magazine would call up to tell me he had a ten-thousand-word hole to fill in his next issue. Id fill it overnight for a hundred and fifty dollars. I found that rewriting m