Hao Jingfang’’s Jumpnauts, translated by Ken Liu, introduces to a wider audience and in a longer form, the science fiction of a Hugo award winning author.
Works outside the Anglosphere, even in translation, are only slowly coming into the SF mainstream. The expansion of SFF has meant that work, especially from China, a large and once largely autonomous pool of science fiction readers, fans and writers, has been slowly but surely connecting with the Anglosphere. More and more works in translation have been coming to Western audiences through the efforts of, at first, primarily magazines like Uncanny and Clarkesworld. A milestone in these efforts to bring Chinese SF to Western audiences was the translation of Cixin Liu’s award-winning The Three-Body Problem.
And so we come to Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts, translated by Ken Liu.
I will get to the actual translation issues and thoughts on Liu’s work on that later on, but I want to acknowledge that translation is incredibly difficult…and interesting things come from and in the process of translation. The difficulty (although with joy) of translation is one reason why we have had so little, especially from the Sinosphere, until recently. We’ll get to that in due course.
Jumpnauts takes us several decades into the future. The United Nations has been weakened, and decamped to Geneva. The Pacific League (roughly East Asia, led by China) and the Atlantic Alliance (the US is never mentioned by name, but it feels like the Atlantic Alliance is a successor to NATO) and a few other polities dominate the globe. The aforementioned two great powers are in a cold war that is warming up rapidly. Too rapidly for anyone’s taste. The set-up mirrors the Soviet-American Cold War of the 20th century, except with a permanent notch upward in warmth. There is no Mutually Assured Destruction here, but there is a fear that a full-on conflict could occur on Earth, in space. But there are plenty of incidents from Africa to Hawaii that keep the two power blocs poking at each other. It’s a horrifying “new normal”.
This is the bottom of the geopolitical pyramid in a series of layers of worldbuilding that Jingfang reveals to us through her characters, whom I will speak about in a moment.
Next, on top of the geopolitical base for events, the real science fictional element and speculation is layered on top by the author. It emerges there is evidence of aliens having visited the Earth in the past at regular intervals,.and are even now coming back. Proof of the aliens’ past visits turns out to be in Xian and a certain collection of Terracotta warriors. But the alien spacecraft, only detected by a few, is most definitely returning to Earth. The book goes into wonderful imaginative detail regarding the aliens’ past visits, how that legacy continues, and then the fact and presence of their nature, now. I inadvertently, thanks to this novel, learned more about ancient Chinese Bronzes than I ever had in museums and podcasts. It’s clear the author has knowledge and did a deep dive into the geekery of all this that I cannot but admire.
Jingfang’s idea here is not a new one. I am reminded particularly of Greg Bear’s Eon, where in the middle of the US-Soviet Cold War, an asteroid spaceship heads toward Earth, and there is an impetus to get there first. A ship full of aliens, whether or not they “really” visited Earth in the past or not, could indeed be the spark for the worldwide war between the two blocs. Thus, the author deftly weaves the story of the aliens’ arrival into her foundational worldbuilding. And the fact that one of her central characters is crucial to the idea that the aliens are not visiting here for the first time helps center and ground that idea.
So let’s meet our cast at last.
Jiang Liu is a bit of a mixed character. The black sheep of a powerful mercantile family in the Pacific League, he is a wildcard who has carved his own path, as much as he can with his family always trying to drag him back to the fold. But he has, thanks to his embracing of blockchain technology1, obtained a power and strength of his own, independent of his family. He is the archetype of someone who deceptively looks weak and fragile, but has a fair amount of clever power at his fingertips. Think of him as posing as a wastrel Bruce Wayne type (and how he is generally regarded) but not needing to put on a mask to show his true powers and abilities.
Next up is Qi Fei. He works for the Pacific League, and in fact has been trying to capture the infamous creator of the Tiangshang Blockchain network, Jiang, for quite some time. We get an excellent “action as character” depiction for both him and Jiang as the two go on an extended chase sequence, complete with high tech, AI and action moments that would be wonderful captured on film. As the novel progresses, we learn his connections to both the other characters and we get a real depth of flowering. Like Jiang, he goes from a one-sided adversary for Jiang and, through backstory and character growth (especially in a sequence in the aliens’ spaceship with Jiang) learns to embrace other paths.
And then there is Yun Fan. She looks at first just like a plot device, the woman Jiang and Qi squabble over. She is the woman whom the playboy who wants to dazzle and make swoon with his nature and power and glamour, and at the same time, a mystery woman from Qi’s past. And we get to see both of these sides, when Jiang takes her to a nightclub run by his family, and later, we find out just how Yu Fan and her family’s past hooks into Qi.
Yu Fan, however, has more agency than either can even imagine. For it is she who is crucial to the idea that aliens have visited Earth in regular intervals. Based in Xian and keeper of its secrets in that regard, she also has a heritage and history that makes her uniquely suited to contact with the aliens. But it’s more than that. She is not a plot device, and continually throughout the narrative, tries to break free of the tropes and molds both Jiang and Qi place on her. And she surprises them, and the reader, time and again. She was my favorite of the trio.
In addition to some minor characters (particularly family members of both Jiang and Qi), there is a fourth character introduced, Chang Tian, pilot turned restaurateur, who becomes necessary as the plot unfolds and the characters decide to make common cause and actually go to the alien ship. He is, unfortunately, very much a fourth wheel in a novel that is in the end about the three main characters. Although he can and does act as a sounding board, he doesn’t get the truly meaty parts of the debates of philosophy, history and ethics that are a large part of this novel. Given that this novel is so top heavy with the debates, it means that, perforce, he is much less of a character than Jiang, Yun and Qi. But he does have a piercing ability to see things, including how the trio relate to each other, in ways they themselves cannot.
We also get the ultimate adversary for the novel, Chris Zhao. He is much more of a plot device, an antagonist the quartet can put their differences against and unite. He’s not quite down to the level of a mustache-twirling villain, but his loyalty and interests with seeing the Atlantic Alliance succeed are, frankly, his primary driving motivations and characterizations.
And what I want to talk about next is the philosophical debating. Philosophical debates in science fiction are nothing new. Talking heads, as it were, debating points of view goes back to Wells, through Stapledon, Asimov, Heinlein, Le Guin, Banks and others. Jingfang’s approach here is what I would call the Heinleinian, except at an even greater length. (Given the amount of time between scenes and locales and waiting for things to kick off, the characters have plenty of time to debate philosophy). But yes, this is the kind of book and the kinds of characters that love the tussle of debate of society. They are passionate, argue and go at length with each other every chance they get.
It would BE completely Heinleinian, except that the three characters use Chinese history, classics and philosophies to argue their viewpoints and come to, very carefully and tentatively, common causes and working together. My knowledge of Chinese classics and philosophical systems is shallow at best, so I mostly followed along with the 30,000-foot level, so that the nuances a native Chinese reader might have mostly gone by the wayside. Mostly.
It’s a lot to take in. For all of the interesting aliens, the high tech, the first contact, the geopolitical world, this is a book that is replete with these debates and discussions. They do dominate the book, in terms of page count as well as narrative load.
The recent works that come to mind here are the Just City trilogy of Jo Walton, which by its nature has Socrates and other thinkers in a recreation of Plato’s Republic, and the philosophical debates sparked thereby. That used a Western perspective to debate freedom, justice and rights, using Plato as its foundational text. Jumpnauts uses classic Chinese texts and philosophy for the same sort of interrogation. And since in the Jumpnauts case, they revolve around a non-Western perspective, they were hard for me to completely grapple with. I would have been lost at sea without the work of the translator to try and bring this to a perspective and frame I could best appreciate.
So thus we come to the matter of translation. This is intimately tied with the philosophy because Liu as translator has a lot of heavy lifting to do in trying to convey this to a Western English-speaking audience. Those aforementioned philosophy sections get footnoted by Liu, as he tries to briefly explain some key concepts for a western reader. It did help me a lot in understanding the nuances that he chooses to enunciate. The number of footnotes is not all that large and he could have easily, and perhaps off-puttingly, trebled that amount. In translating the novel, Liu didn’t just have to translate the action-adventure sequences, and the aforementioned character relations; he had to translate the philosophy, too, and get the spirit and essence of those debates. As someone who has no knowledge of Chinese, I have no idea if the translation is accurate (for whatever you want to define as “accurate”), but I certainly saw the logic, reason and positions in each of the Socratic dialogues and saw the positions of each person.
Jumpnauts, in the end, is a very ambitious and interesting novel. I’m not completely sold on it, but that might be my idiosyncratic and personal distrust of things like blockchain, and the very weird black hole about not mentioning the US by name. (I can’t be sure if that was Jingfeng’s choice, or Liu’s translation choice, but the somewhat nebulous nature of the League and Alliance was something more of a bug than a feature for me in worldbuilding).
It certainly has an interesting take on the hoary old trope of aliens visiting us in the past and now coming to visit us in the now and future. My knowledge of some of the details of Chinese history that intersect with the alien visits is fuzzy at best, However, the author does present what is to me a credible scenario for past alien contact, and manages to approach it with skepticism. Part of the aforementioned debates of history and philosophy DO center around skepticism over Yun Fan’s claims and belief and certainty that the aliens were real, are real and are benign. It’s an assumption that her counterparts examine and debate ruthlessly, right up to the point of boarding the alien ship and beyond. There is a real sense of wonder to the alien ship, and what lies beyond it, but the main characters engage their answers with more questions.
And that, I think, is what the “science fiction project” is all about. Thus, I warmly welcome Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts into the genre conversation.
1 One of the divisive things, I think, for potential readers in this novel is the utter embrace of the blockchain by Jiang. Given that this is a novel heavy on explication, debate and philosophy, this means that the potential Jiang sees in the blockchain gets put out at length, again and again. It is notable that the whole idea of aliens visiting gets more pushback than the use of blockchain. (Indeed, even AI is shown to have its limitations and weaknesses. Blockchain gets no such scrutiny or counterpoint).
