{"id":879,"date":"2020-03-25T00:01:23","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T04:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/future-sf.com\/?p=879"},"modified":"2020-03-08T14:32:40","modified_gmt":"2020-03-08T18:32:40","slug":"vagabonds-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/non-fiction\/vagabonds-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Vagabonds Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Vagabonds<\/a>
<\/em>by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu
Hardcover, April 2020
Saga Press
ISBN-13: 978-1534422087<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Vagabonds<\/em>, written by Hao Jingfang and translated by Ken Liu, two previously warring factions, Mars and Earth, attempt to ease their mutual distrust by sending a group of Martian teenagers to spend a few years on Earth as part of a cultural exchange. The novel begins when the group of teenagers returns to Mars. Upon their return, they realize their peaceful mission did little to alleviate the conflict between the planets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vagabonds<\/em> is a novel that would benefit from an attentive and dedicated reader, one who is willing to invest in this rich, unhurried, polyphonic narrative. It refuses to cater to the kind of reader who judges the book by the first ten pages: the first chapter is long and luxuriously slow, full of exposition and musings on the nature of the human conflict that had occurred thirty years ago. This introduction is reminiscent of Jules Verne works and reads as part travelog and part philosophical treatise.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The slow tempo, somewhat unusual\nfor contemporary English-language science fiction, holds up throughout the\nnovel. As the conflict among several personalities and groups develops, Hao\nJingfang never strays away from exposition. She painstakingly builds the\nenvironment in which the solar system is split into two civil factions by\nemploying long scenes full of technical details: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe\ninterior of the cylindrical hull was radially divided into four sections. The\nfour quarters were interconnected, but the passageways were so complicated and\nfar apart that few ever bothered to visit the other quarters. The crew took up\none of the quarters, and the Terran delegation, the Martian delegation, and the\nMercury Group each took up another. Although the four groups had been traveling\ntogether for almost a hundred days, there were few cross-group visits. Plenty\nof all-hands parties were held, to be sure, but the conversation was always\nstrained and formal.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The surprisingly objective\npolitical commentary on the nature of capitalism versus communism is interwoven\nwith a deeply personal discovery: the students realize they are nothing but\npawns in a complicated multi-generational game between the two planets. Their\ntime on Earth was challenging; for Luoying, a dance student, the challenge was\nin \u201ctwo kinds of adjustment, opposite in\ndirection. While she had to adjust to a far more primitive mode of life filled\nwith inconveniences, she also had to adjust to a far more complex lifestyle.\nMars City was much more advanced than cities on Earth in infrastructure and\noperation, but the lifestyle on Mars was older and simpler. In Luoying\u2019s eyes,\nMartians had Apollonic clarity, while Terrans had Dionysian frenzy.<\/em>\u201d Their\nreturn to Mars was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that is where the novel takes\nan interesting philosophical turn. A dynamic plot is certainly present, full of\nintrigue, secrets, twists, and all kinds of fascinating scientific theories.\nHowever, first and foremost, Vagabonds is about the trials and tribulations of\nmigration. Upon returning home, Luoying, along with her friends, discovers that\nshe no longer belongs in either world. Their time away from Mars had rendered\nthem different. They had absorbed the Western philosophy of Earth and now\nstruggle in the allegedly utopian Martian society. The slow realization that\nthey no longer fit in on their own planet is offered as a commentary even when\na burst of emotion could be reasonably expected, but it doesn\u2019t make the\nsentiment any less raw and poignant. They are true vagabonds, with no place or\neven language of their own. Having absorbed so many Terran ideas, they struggle\nto express their own thoughts in the world where \u201cevery form of expression is a language: perception, logic, painting,\nscience, dreams, proverbs, political theories, passion, psychoanalysis\u2014all are\nways to articulate the world.<\/em>\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vagabonds<\/em> may be set in the fantastical\nworld of the future, and yet its central conflict is very real\u2014this sense of\nnot belonging is something quite familiar to anyone who has moved to a foreign\ncountry for a considerable amount of time. The more Hao Jingfang\u2019s characters\nassimilate, the further away they are from their origins. The external conflicts\nthey face are insignificant compared to their internal struggle. Perhaps it was\nthis theme of migration that attracted Ken Liu, the renowned author and\ntranslator, and himself an immigrant and bilingual, to this novel. Liu\u2019s\ntranslation is flawless, starting with the most perfect title for a science\nfiction novel. Liu manages to keep the slightly foreign rhythm and style of the\noriginal text without resorting to awkward or unusual English constructions: \u201cThe ship they were on was forever\nvacillating on the Lagrangian point between the two worlds. To vacillate was\nalso never to belong. It was their fate to be cosmic vagabonds.<\/em>\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is thanks to the joint efforts of Hao Jingfang and Ken Liu, that the story of psychological warfare and interplanetary tension is elevated to the struggle of finding one\u2019s own place in the universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buy <\/a>Vagabonds <\/a><\/em>here.<\/a><\/p>\n
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Vagabondsby Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken LiuHardcover, April 2020Saga PressISBN-13: 978-1534422087 In Vagabonds, written by Hao Jingfang and translated by Ken Liu, two previously warring factions, Mars and Earth, attempt to ease their mutual distrust by sending a group of Martian teenagers to spend a few years on Earth as part of a cultural exchange. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":908,"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions\/908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/future-sf.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}