Jumpnauts

By Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu

Science fiction/Head of Zeus/Paperback/368 pages/$27.81/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3PssYrU)
4 stars

Folding space made Hao Jingfang famous. In 2016, her science-fiction novelette Folding Beijing made her the first Chinese woman to win the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy works.

That story imagines a space-scarce Beijing divided into three classes, with each class allocated a set time exposed to the surface while the other two sections of the city are folded away as their residents sleep.

From folding cities, Hao has moved on to folding universes. In her second novel, the cerebral thriller Jumpnauts, alien technology enables civilisations to transcend space, “tunnelling” between universes, connecting and entangling them.

Jumpnauts, which was published in Chinese in 2021, has been translated into English by Ken Liu, who also translated Folding Beijing and fellow Hugo-winning novel The Three-Body Problem (2014) by Liu Cixin, currently the biggest name in Chinese science fiction.

The English edition of Jumpnauts was released less than a fortnight before the March 21 premiere of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, the adaptation of Liu Cixin’s mind-stretching saga about first contact between humans and aliens.

It is a canny move: Jumpnauts seems primed for screen adaptation. It may be primarily a novel of ideas, but its dense disquisitions on technology, politics and philosophy are spiced up with action sequences out of wuxia (Chinese martial arts) or the Indiana Jones movies.

The year is 2080. The world has been divided into two factions, the Pacific League and Atlantic Alliance. As they hover on the verge of war, a signal comes from outer space: an alien spaceship is approaching Earth at nearly the speed of light.

Most assume the aliens are hostile, but Yun Fan, a young archaeologist in Xi’an, China, believes otherwise. She has dedicated her life to proving the supposedly crackpot theory of her father, an esteemed academic who died in disgrace.

He posited that Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, had contact with aliens. In fact, these aliens may have been present throughout Earth’s history, their visits coinciding with major technological advancements in the world’s civilisations.

To meet the aliens before Earth’s superpowers shoot them out of the sky, Yun Fan reluctantly accepts the help of two men who are rivals for her affections.

One, astronomer Jiang Liu, appears to be the ne’er-do-well scion of wealthy power brokers. In fact, he is the head of Tianshang, the world’s largest non-governmental intelligence network that uses blockchain technology to empower the masses.

The other, Qi Fei, is the director of a Pacific League military research institute, in charge of its powerful artificial intelligence system, CloudMind. He is also Yun Fan’s ex-boyfriend.

The trio head into space to intercept the alien craft along with Qi Fei’s friend Chang Tian, an easygoing former military pilot-turned-chef who does not mind being the fourth wheel on this mission.

The early chapters brim with a plethora of inventions – a hoverbike that transforms into armour, wearable tech that hacks wireless connections through dance movement, a levitating bench. And this is even before the alien technology comes into play.

Hao, who has an undergraduate degree in physics and a PhD in economics, dances between a dizzying variety of ideas, from matter-antimatter annihilation to the Confucian concept of “ren”, which has no exact translation in English but may be expressed very roughly as “being human together”.

The side effect of this is that her characters often come across as talking heads. The romantic triangle alluded to in earlier chapters is soon swept aside in favour of intellectual discourse.

The central thesis of Jumpnauts is that information exchange is the true driving force behind the progress of civilisation. It is thus ironic that one of the novel’s stumbling blocks is its translation.

Ken Liu has made a commendable effort to convey complex Chinese concepts in English. His thought process behind translating the name of an information-carrying particle as “gryon” is especially fascinating, as is his comparison of the conflation of “heart” and “mind” in the Chinese word “xin” to the Anglo-Saxon “breost”.

For the most part, however, the prose feels strained and encumbered, missing the elegant economy of the original.

He writes in a foreword that a “translation that reads as though it had been originally written in the target language is a bad translation – it doesn’t try to challenge the reader”. One wishes, however, that Jumpnauts did not read so obviously and effortfully as a translation.

Still, as Hao argues in this ultimately hopeful novel, humankind is as yet at a nascent stage of information exchange. Better the imperfect effort to connect than not to try at all.

If you like this, read: Vagabonds (Head of Zeus, 2020, $23.63, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/490JxSQ), Hao’s hefty debut novel, similarly translated by Ken Liu, set in a future where Earth has cut ties with the human colonies on Mars after a civil war. A group of Martian students, sent to Earth as goodwill ambassadors five years ago, returns home escorting a Terran delegation and struggles to bridge the divide between the two planets.