Teaser

What if we are not alone in the universe? What if we have been visited? And what if there’s a chance we might destroy ourselves before ever learning the answers to life’s greatest questions . . ?

Review

Continuing a recent trend of me finally getting around to books that I’ve had o on my TBR for a while is this offering from Chinese author Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu). I bought this book last year, but had actually been on the hunt for it since the day it was published. Hao’s only other novel (at least, the only one available in English) was Vagabonds, and that was one of my favourite books of 2019. I had really high hopes for Jumpnauts, despite not really knowing what it was going to be about.

I have seen, floating around on the internet, the suggestion that this is the first in a trilogy. Since I can’t read or speak Chinese, I haven’t found anything to back that up, but if it is the start of a series, I can happily say that it stands on its own perfectly well. No need to worry about cliffhangers.

Jumpnauts starts off simply enough. Earth is stuck in a war between (broadly speaking) the East and the West. The details are, I believe purposefully, vague. From this background we follow three young people who uncover evidence that not only was Earth visited by aliens in the past, but that those aliens might be coming back. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that they go into space and have a profound experience.

Which is where things get hazy. A large portion of this book hinges on discussions of Chinese philosophy. There’s the Confucianism that most British people like myself will be vaguely aware of, but also a whole lot more. Passages are quoted and deliberately misquoted in a way that probably works a whole lot better if you’re familiar with the source material. Ken Liu does what he can with footnotes, but when the concepts are so firmly interwoven with the text, there’s no real way to get around the unfamiliarity.

On that note, I must say that Liu continues to be a terrific translator. The only sections that don’t flow so well are in the dialogue, and I think that’s at least partially down to the formality of the language used, which is in keeping with the original. Liu gives us a handful of notes at the start of the book explaining his rationale for various choices, and footnotes throughout pick out some trickier moments for anglophone readers.

I expect most readers of this blog are familiar with the name Cixin Liu, whose Remembrance of Earth’s Past series brought Chinese SF to the attention of English-speaking readers. After a slight boom in Sinophone science fiction, things do seem to have died down a bit, but Hao and others are proof that there is a rich vein of SF that can still be tapped into. Even if a lot of the philosophy went right over my head, and even if half the references didn’t land, there is so much to be gained from reading fiction from other languages and cultures, and good on Head of Zeus for continuing to publish translated works here in the UK.

As for Jumpnauts, standalone or series opener, it’s an impressive novel. You never quite know where it’s going next, from war-torn archaeological sites to grand cosmic sweeps of the imagination. I thoroughly recommend it.