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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
“This is the tale of the fall of the last utopia.”
― Vagabonds, prologue.
Don't let the prologue fool you: Vagabonds is not that kind of sci-fi. It's not a war story, even though the possibility and memory of war are ever-present shadows; it's not a story about an apocalypse. It is a slow-paced, introspective novel about a group of young Martians returning to their planet after having spent years studying on Earth, where they started to question everything about their way of life. This is a tale about the fall of the concept of utopia in the characters' mind; a story about loss of faith accompanied by gain of insight. A story about how a society came close to becoming the very thing it swore to never be.
While it follows many characters, the closest thing to a main character Vagabonds has is Louying, the granddaughter of the Martian consul and one of the eighteen-year-olds returning from Earth. We follow her journey in discovering the history of her family and some ugly truths tied to it; we follow her as she asks questions and tries to find answers that work for her, and a place that might fit her after the way her experience in with living on two very different planets shaped her.
Louying has been taught she lives in an utopia, while the citizens of Earth believe her grandfather is a dictator; the truth is much more complicated than either statement. This book navigates these questions - what makes an utopia; what is freedom; what it means to be a dictator - while exploring many different points of views. It compares Martian collectivism against the individualism of Earth, digs into each society's failing, and it never gives you definitive answers, but it still exposes the dangers of cultural exceptionalism, supremacy and close-mindedness. At its heart, Vagabonds is a story about the importance of communication between different viewpoints, how we can all learn a lot from each other.
I'm always here for stories that talk about what utopia might mean. I find the very concept of utopia as we usually define it inherently disturbing because stasis seems encoded in its very foundation, when that's antithetical to human nature, or nature in general. (If ecological stability in an ecosystem is always is a dynamic equilibrium, I don't have reasons to believe the situation is much different for human societies.) This book gets how every generation perceives its society in a different way and always strives for change, as it's natural, but sometimes doesn't understand the impact it may have.
I liked the lack of answers paired to a very well-defined, resonant character arc. At the same time, my usual bookish habitat is western queer SFF, so I kept thinking that Mars is a dystopia without considering any of these things just for its treatment of women - all people involved in politics are men and so are most people this book shows being involved in the sciences (all the relevant female characters are artists); you can also see the reflection of this in how the men around Louying treat her. I recognize this as the simplistic take it is, and yet it's not something I can brush off. Maybe it's because it isn't an element of comparison - I don't have any reason to believe book-Earth is any better in this - so the book chose not to engage with that. I don't know; I'll just say that it kept jumping up at me. Especially considering how multifaceted the worldbuilding is, how the book manages to talk in detail about the role of art, architecture, history, revolutions and innovation in a society, also going into the details of physics and engineering on Mars.
In an American categorization, this book would probably be seen as something standing on the line between genre and literary fiction, with the premise of the first and the mood and aim of the second. As I'm only familiar with the first, I can say that compared to the average sci-fi, is significantly slower, descriptive and meandering, with an almost dreamlike atmosphere. The characters are wonderfully crafted but you're not reading the story for them (for the most part, I say, thinking about Dr. Reini), and there are some beautiful parts involving space exploration on the surface of Mars, but they're again not the point. I ended up liking this book, but I think it's important to know all of this before going into it - it's not what you usually get from a sci-fi Saga Press tome. As for the translation, this is possibly the best translation I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. It probably helps that the translator is an author himself.
Buddy read with Silvia! Read her review here.
― Vagabonds, prologue.
Don't let the prologue fool you: Vagabonds is not that kind of sci-fi. It's not a war story, even though the possibility and memory of war are ever-present shadows; it's not a story about an apocalypse. It is a slow-paced, introspective novel about a group of young Martians returning to their planet after having spent years studying on Earth, where they started to question everything about their way of life. This is a tale about the fall of the concept of utopia in the characters' mind; a story about loss of faith accompanied by gain of insight. A story about how a society came close to becoming the very thing it swore to never be.
While it follows many characters, the closest thing to a main character Vagabonds has is Louying, the granddaughter of the Martian consul and one of the eighteen-year-olds returning from Earth. We follow her journey in discovering the history of her family and some ugly truths tied to it; we follow her as she asks questions and tries to find answers that work for her, and a place that might fit her after the way her experience in with living on two very different planets shaped her.
Louying has been taught she lives in an utopia, while the citizens of Earth believe her grandfather is a dictator; the truth is much more complicated than either statement. This book navigates these questions - what makes an utopia; what is freedom; what it means to be a dictator - while exploring many different points of views. It compares Martian collectivism against the individualism of Earth, digs into each society's failing, and it never gives you definitive answers, but it still exposes the dangers of cultural exceptionalism, supremacy and close-mindedness. At its heart, Vagabonds is a story about the importance of communication between different viewpoints, how we can all learn a lot from each other.
I'm always here for stories that talk about what utopia might mean. I find the very concept of utopia as we usually define it inherently disturbing because stasis seems encoded in its very foundation, when that's antithetical to human nature, or nature in general. (If ecological stability in an ecosystem is always is a dynamic equilibrium, I don't have reasons to believe the situation is much different for human societies.) This book gets how every generation perceives its society in a different way and always strives for change, as it's natural, but sometimes doesn't understand the impact it may have.
I liked the lack of answers paired to a very well-defined, resonant character arc. At the same time, my usual bookish habitat is western queer SFF, so I kept thinking that Mars is a dystopia without considering any of these things just for its treatment of women - all people involved in politics are men and so are most people this book shows being involved in the sciences (all the relevant female characters are artists); you can also see the reflection of this in how the men around Louying treat her. I recognize this as the simplistic take it is, and yet it's not something I can brush off. Maybe it's because it isn't an element of comparison - I don't have any reason to believe book-Earth is any better in this - so the book chose not to engage with that. I don't know; I'll just say that it kept jumping up at me. Especially considering how multifaceted the worldbuilding is, how the book manages to talk in detail about the role of art, architecture, history, revolutions and innovation in a society, also going into the details of physics and engineering on Mars.
In an American categorization, this book would probably be seen as something standing on the line between genre and literary fiction, with the premise of the first and the mood and aim of the second. As I'm only familiar with the first, I can say that compared to the average sci-fi, is significantly slower, descriptive and meandering, with an almost dreamlike atmosphere. The characters are wonderfully crafted but you're not reading the story for them (for the most part, I say, thinking about Dr. Reini), and there are some beautiful parts involving space exploration on the surface of Mars, but they're again not the point. I ended up liking this book, but I think it's important to know all of this before going into it - it's not what you usually get from a sci-fi Saga Press tome. As for the translation, this is possibly the best translation I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. It probably helps that the translator is an author himself.
Buddy read with Silvia! Read her review here.
I was sent this book as an advance listening copy via libro.fm for reviewing purposes, but all opinions are my own.
This was an overall interesting experience and I'm looking forward to not doing it again!
More seriously and in case it isn't clear, I actually really, really liked this and I think it did very interesting things. It's basically literary fic in a sci-fi trenchcoat and if you're wondering what that means: a whole lot of introspection and philosophy, not even one space battle and more physics than your average novel. Which, to me, meant that I really enjoyed it, but I am also aware that I would have never finished it if I hadn't been listening to the audiobook.
The book is divided in three parts and each follows a more or less self-contained arc, with recurring characters and what we could call the rightful main character, Luoying, who was part of a group of students who were sent to study on Earth for five years and are now back on Mars and trying to adjust to the society they were born in after experiencing, literally, a whole different world.
Luoying is also the granddaughter of what is known on Earth as the dictator of Mars (but nobody on Mars would call him that, because utopia), and she makes for an interesting main character also thanks to the fact that she's so close to the Mars establishment, but not only.
I think Hao Jingfang managed to get away with what frankly is a 650-page introspection fest because she managed to make it not about the individual but about the whole, even though in the novel very little happens in terms of events and plot points and most of the development happens internally, through Luoying's POV.
It's impossible to read this book and not make a direct comparison to different types of society in our reality, although the differences are much more emphasized in the book, and while reading this and discussing about it with my buddy read partner we found ourselves in similar situations as the characters of the book, wondering about "the other side" and then realizing we didn't know enough and all we had were speculations and assumptions, not dissimilar to how Martians assume things about Earth (and the other way around too). If this was even one of Hao Jingfang's goals, since she probably knew her novel would be translated, then she fully succeeded in it.
If you're scared of sci-fi but still want to read a novel that more or less answers the ever-present curiosity of "what would a human society on Mars look like?", with no space battles and very few scifi-typical elements, this might be for you. I highly recommend the audiobook if you're too impatient to sit down and read something so slow paced, but I promise its pace makes sense, and while I don't think this is the kind of book that would make onto many favorite lists, it is one of those novels that you'll find yourself thinking back to more than once.
Buddy read with Acqua (check out her review!)
This was an overall interesting experience and I'm looking forward to not doing it again!
More seriously and in case it isn't clear, I actually really, really liked this and I think it did very interesting things. It's basically literary fic in a sci-fi trenchcoat and if you're wondering what that means: a whole lot of introspection and philosophy, not even one space battle and more physics than your average novel. Which, to me, meant that I really enjoyed it, but I am also aware that I would have never finished it if I hadn't been listening to the audiobook.
The book is divided in three parts and each follows a more or less self-contained arc, with recurring characters and what we could call the rightful main character, Luoying, who was part of a group of students who were sent to study on Earth for five years and are now back on Mars and trying to adjust to the society they were born in after experiencing, literally, a whole different world.
Luoying is also the granddaughter of what is known on Earth as the dictator of Mars (but nobody on Mars would call him that, because utopia), and she makes for an interesting main character also thanks to the fact that she's so close to the Mars establishment, but not only.
I think Hao Jingfang managed to get away with what frankly is a 650-page introspection fest because she managed to make it not about the individual but about the whole, even though in the novel very little happens in terms of events and plot points and most of the development happens internally, through Luoying's POV.
It's impossible to read this book and not make a direct comparison to different types of society in our reality, although the differences are much more emphasized in the book, and while reading this and discussing about it with my buddy read partner we found ourselves in similar situations as the characters of the book, wondering about "the other side" and then realizing we didn't know enough and all we had were speculations and assumptions, not dissimilar to how Martians assume things about Earth (and the other way around too). If this was even one of Hao Jingfang's goals, since she probably knew her novel would be translated, then she fully succeeded in it.
If you're scared of sci-fi but still want to read a novel that more or less answers the ever-present curiosity of "what would a human society on Mars look like?", with no space battles and very few scifi-typical elements, this might be for you. I highly recommend the audiobook if you're too impatient to sit down and read something so slow paced, but I promise its pace makes sense, and while I don't think this is the kind of book that would make onto many favorite lists, it is one of those novels that you'll find yourself thinking back to more than once.
Buddy read with Acqua (check out her review!)