I want to recommend a book in which a Harvard-trained astronomer who doubles as a global crypto-criminal goes on a voyage to the stars in search of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. A book in which two men who love the same woman battle through an elaborate series of Indiana Jones-esque traps while debating the relative merits of Mohist and Legalist thought. In which mythical beasts walk in metallic bodies as AI assistants whisper in the ears of intelligence officers. In which great alliances clash and missiles sometimes carry not munitions but spyware.
Mostly, I want to recommend that you read the work of Hao Jingfang, the woman who wrote this book, “Jumpnauts.” It is a novel so busy and brilliant that I can describe it only in the way the proverbial blind men might an elephant, touching one staggering detail and then another without ever quite capturing the whole. In that regard, it is characteristic of Hao’s profound, and sometimes profoundly bizarre, creative mind.
Often associated with the Chinese science fiction novelist Cixin Liu — the author of “The Three-Body Problem” — Hao first came to the attention of English-language readers through her short fiction. “Folding Beijing,” which received the 2016 Hugo Award for best novelette, depicts a future in which the megalopolis has been divided into three cities that occupy the same piece of land. These three Beijings are marked by disparities in wealth — and disparities in time, with each of them literally rotating down into the ground on a fixed 48-hour schedule. The rich inhabitants of the first Beijing spend a full day above in each cycle, while the poorest get just eight hours of moonlight before they return to their subterranean barrow.
Taking to this conceit as if it were as obvious and ordinary as the Parisian boulevards, Hao tells the story of a sanitation worker from the impoverished underworld who discovers a message from above and undertakes a risky, illegal journey to assist the man who sent it. Like Hao’s longer works, “Folding Beijing” demonstrates a keen and sometimes cutting intellectual edge, but it is richest in its smaller moments of cross-class contact. There, despite its science fiction trappings, it echoes and equals the great works of 19th-century realist novelists such as Zola and Balzac.
“Folding Beijing” appears in English in “Invisible Planets,” the translator Ken Liu’s collection of contemporary Chinese short science fiction, which also includes stories by Cixin Liu, Chen Qiufan and others. That volume shares its title with a second story by Hao, a delightful play on Italo Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities.” Hao’s unnamed narrator describes — in a style not unlike Calvino’s own — a series of impossible worlds, occasionally interrupted by a beguiled but sometimes skeptical listener. In one vignette, the narrator describes a world with two intelligent species, unaware of each other’s existence because they experience time on vastly different scales. Another brief chapter imagines a civilization built along a cliff that circles the equator of a divided globe, “ice and snow” above and “endless ocean” below.
The brevity of “Invisible Planets” is its only flaw; one longs for Hao to go on longer, as Calvino did, partly because it is so clear that she could keep spooling out these visions indefinitely. But she is more concerned with the observation at which she ultimately arrives: that storytelling is a form of contact, one in which both speaker and listener, teller and told, share something with each other, such that both inevitably leave the encounter transformed.
Similar questions of exchange animate “Vagabonds,” the first of Hao’s novels that was published in English (also translated by Ken Liu). It traces a brewing 23rd-century conflict between the rigorously structured society of Mars and the more laissez-faire civilization that remains on Earth. In a science fiction series such as the Expanse, this scenario would give way to military maneuvering and covert missions. “Vagabonds,” by contrast, shares more in common with stories such as Samuel R. Delany’s “Trouble on Triton” (1976), in which interplanetary conflict is more backdrop than subject matter. Hao attends more to the young artists and thinkers of Mars, focusing on the ways that they struggle to represent and make sense of the conceptual gap between their home and the greener world 140 million miles away.
At 600 dense pages, “Vagabonds” can be daunting: My early-pandemic Zoom book club essentially shut down after we selected it as our next book, a development for which I still hold myself at fault. (Sorry, guys!) It is, in effect, a protracted rethinking of the philosophical issues that Ursula K. Le Guin (whose work is explicitly referenced in “Jumpnauts”) considers in her seminal novel “The Dispossessed” (1974). Like Le Guin, Hao is preoccupied here with the philosophical distinction between positive and negative liberty — the freedom to act within constraints (embodied by harsh Mars) vs. the freedom from constraints (represented by the resource-rich Earth). Though “Vagabonds” ultimately suggests that Martian restraint may be preferable to Terran permissiveness, it also captures the discontent of those who live under Mars’s harsh skies. Never reducible to real-world political allegory (Mars and Earth aren’t analogues for China and the United States), it nevertheless flirts with something like political theory writ large.
The newly translated “Jumpnauts” makes for a more accessible entry point into Hao’s work, though it is no less intellectually ambitious. In brief, it follows a trio of brilliant polymaths who become preoccupied with a signal from space that seems to be approaching Earth. Convinced that it’s emanating from an alien craft that has visited Earth at crucial moments in human history — a conceit that brushes up against but largely sidesteps the more risible qualities of “ancient alien” conspiracy theories — they set out in a ship of their own to find the source of the message, pursued and monitored by representatives of Earth’s great powers. Soon, they find themselves asking questions about the very nature of reality as their mission takes on interdimensional stakes.
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In Liu’s translation, at least, Hao’s prose sometimes plods along with an unfortunate rigidity, even when her plot is at its most playful. But a warm gust of wonder keeps the proceedings aloft — sometimes literally, as when two of the protagonists engage in a highflying martial arts duel with the assistance of some sort of rocket-powered boots. “Jumpnauts” is relentlessly charming, often because it is so poker-faced about its own zaniness, as when a being that resembles a qilin (a hoofed creature from Chinese mythology) explains that what humans call “dark matter” actually represents a variety of substances, some of which are responsive to thought itself.
Ultimately, “Jumpnauts” is as different from Hao’s other English-language fictions as it is representative of her oeuvre as a whole. It is precisely its madcap range that makes it such a treat, its total lack of interest in distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow entertainment or between philosophy and mere fancy. “Can any planet have belonged to us?” Hao’s narrator asks rhetorically in “Invisible Planets.” “Or can we have belonged to any planet?” Hao’s fiction operates in the lively space between those two questions, challenging both our hold on the world and its hold on us.
Jacob Brogan is an editor with Book World at The Washington Post.
Jumpnauts
By Hao Jingfang, translated from Chinese by Ken Liu
Saga. 368 pp. $18.99, paperback
