Considerations of time and speculative worlds kept coming up this year. Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time (Allen Lane) helped in my latest effort to understand entropy, and the meaning of time past, present and future in any story that we may try to tell. With chapter titles like ‘The Inadequacy of Grammar’ and ‘The Scent of Madeleine’, Rovelli presents the science with welcome literary and stylistic clarity. In Richard Powers’ arboreal novel, The Overstory, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Neelay Mehta dedicates his life to a project of world-building and ‘raising decaying corpses’. Neelay is a computer programmer whose simulations grow into full-blown Earth simulacra that will allow future humans to experience the prelapsarian natural world – before it was so blithely destroyed by our species. – 对时间和投机世界的考虑今年不断出现。卡洛·罗维利的《时间秩序》(艾伦·莱恩)帮助我最近努力理解熵，以及过去时间、现在时间以及未来时间在我们试图讲述的任何故事中的意义。罗维利以“语法的不足”和“玛德琳的气息”这样的章节标题向人们展示了科学，在文学和文体上都非常清晰。在理查德·鲍尔斯（Richard Powers）的《树栖小说》中，今年布克奖（Booker Prize）的入围者，尼尔·梅塔（Neelay Mehta）把他的一生献给了一个建设世界和“养育腐烂的尸体”的项目。Neelay是一个计算机程序员，他的模拟成长为成熟的地球模拟，这将允许未来人类体验先天自然世界——在它被我们物种如此快乐地摧毁之前。