revolution has sparked technological progress on an unprecedented scale. With every new smartphone application, we’re coming ever closer to the realization of that old dream of modernity — the emancipation from the confines of the natural world and our ascendancy into the realm of freedom. Not so fast, cautioned economic historian Michael Lind in a 2010 Time Magazine article titled “The Boring Age.” So far, the twenty-first century has produced nothing revelatory on the scale of the innovations of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries. “In fact, the gadgets of the information age have had nothing like the transformative effects on life and industry that indoor electric lighting, refrigerators, electric and natural gas ovens and indoor plumbing produced in the early to mid-20th century,” Lind writes. Thus, his outlook for the future is admittedly boring: the nation state will persist, as will fossil fuels. Advances in biotechnology, however, will allow people to “live longer and healthier lives, and consequently the largest single occupation in 2050 will be — drumroll, please — nursing!” Not excited by this vision? Neither is Lind, yet it reads more realistically than anything cooked up by Mark Zuckerberg and his hoard of epigones in the suburban sprawl outside of San Francisco. Michael Martone’s new short story collection The Moon Over Wapakoneta is a manifesto of and for the “boring age.” What binds together the “Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond,” which the book’s subtitle promises, is a desire to arrest the march of time. Seconds are made to feel like hours and the hour or two it takes to read the book like an eternity. This is because each of the many, often extremely short, stories is a variation on the same theme, namely whether it’s possible to write a story that’s “concentrated and condensed into this bite-sized tablet.” Elsewhere, we read that “Nothing happens here and yet everything does. There, it happened there, right there as the ‘yet,’ the fulcrum of the previous sentence, when things, things, turned.” The “here” is a version of that border zone between Ohio and Martone’s native Indiana. Separated by a mere state line, moving between the states is an instance of time travel, where, depending on the direction of travel, you either gain or lose an hour — and ever so often, an atomic clock throws in a “leap second or two to bring the world up to speed.” The book’s recurring firstperson narrator, of course, never does feel up to speed, and so this technological fix is required to bring him back into synchronicity with the march of time. In the book’s title story, he is left to ruminate on the persistent change unfolding all around him, which has led to the colonization of the moon, our satellite companion that had been first stepped on by the Wapakoneta native Neil Armstrong. “Here’s to the first man on the moon from the last person on earth,” the narrator’s melancholy toast goes. Shortly after his famous expedition, Armstrong predicted that moon bases were surely to follow “in our lifetime.” Unfortunately, nothing became of his optimistic vision. On the contrary, we are still locked in Cold War-like combat with the former Soviet Union, courtesy of a foreign policy and media apparatus to whom, too, time appears to stand still. In fact, it’s plausible to think that the innovations in digital technology we encountered since 1969 have been little more than side effects of the Apollo space program. In other words, today we are riding the dying outliers of the last long wave of economic expansion, not the exciting rapid ones

中文翻译：

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太阳底下无新鲜事

革命以前所未有的规模引发了技术进步。随着每一个新的智能手机应用程序的出现，我们离实现现代性的旧梦想越来越近了——从自然世界的限制中解放出来，让我们进入自由领域。经济历史学家迈克尔·林德 (Michael Lind) 在 2010 年《时代》杂志题为“无聊的时代”(The Boring Age) 的文章中告诫说，不要那么快。到目前为止，21 世纪并没有产生与 19 世纪和 20 世纪早期到中期的创新规模相比具有什么启示意义。“事实上，信息时代的小玩意儿对生活和工业的变革影响与 20 世纪早期至中期产生的室内电灯、冰箱、电和天然气烤箱以及室内管道相比，没有什么可比的，”林德写道。因此，无可否认，他对未来的展望是乏味的：民族国家将继续存在，化石燃料也将如此。然而，生物技术的进步将使人们“活得更久、更健康，因此，2050 年最大的单一职业将是——请打鼓——护理！” 不为这个愿景感到兴奋吗？林德也不是，但它读起来比马克扎克伯格和他在旧金山郊外郊区蔓延的追随者囤积的任何东西都更现实。Michael Martone 的新短篇小说集 The Moon Over Wapakoneta 是“无聊时代”的宣言。这本书的副标题所承诺的将“来自印第安纳州及其他地方的小说和科幻小说”结合在一起的是一种阻止时间前进的愿望。秒让人感觉像是几个小时，而阅读这本书所需的一两个小时就像永恒一样。这是因为许多（通常是极短的）故事中的每一个都是同一主题的变体，即是否有可能写出一个“浓缩并浓缩到这个一口大小的平板电脑中”的故事。在其他地方，我们读到“这里什么都没有发生，但一切都在发生。在那里，它发生在那里，就在那里，作为上一句的支点，当事情，事情发生转变时。” “这里”是俄亥俄州和马托内印第安纳州之间的边界区的一个版本。仅仅被一条状态线隔开，在状态之间移动是时间旅行的一个例子，根据旅行的方向，你要么增加一小时，要么减少一小时——而且经常，原子钟抛出“闰秒或两个让世界跟上步伐。” 这本书反复出现的第一人称叙述者，当然，从来没有跟上节奏，因此需要这种技术修复才能使他与时间的前进同步。在这本书的标题故事中，他不得不沉思在他周围展开的持续变化，这导致了月球的殖民化，我们的卫星伴侣是由瓦帕科内塔本地人尼尔阿姆斯特朗首先踏上的。“这是地球上最后一个人中的第一个登上月球的人，”叙述者忧郁的祝酒词。在他著名的探险之后不久，阿姆斯特朗预测月球基地肯定会“在我们有生之年”跟随。不幸的是，他的乐观愿景没有任何改变。相反，我们仍然与前苏联陷入冷战式的战斗，这得益于外交政策和媒体机构，时间似乎也停滞不前。实际上，有可能认为我们自 1969 年以来遇到的数字技术创新只不过是阿波罗太空计划的副作用。换句话说，今天我们乘坐的是上一波经济扩张长波中垂死的异常值，而不是令人兴奋的快速增长浪潮