We Love Aliens

Jumpnauts has an enduring start. It begins like this:

Exploding shells shook the lights in the bar.

The glass on the bar jumped, swishing the liquid inside without spilling any over the rim. Through the window, the glow of distant fire bursts could be glimpsed, which limned the angular houses stacked against the mountainside. Along the coast, a crescent of seawater sparkled, bright orange, a dab of paint where the sand met the waves. 

The ocean farther toward the horizon was still steeped in darkness, like the inside of some monstrous beast. A young man sitting at the bar almost picked up the glass in front of him before restraining himself. This was already the third attack of the night. 

The opening lets us know how this story is going to be – equal parts action and contemplation. The young man at the bar is Jiang Liu, wayward son of a blackmarket intelligence baron. He affects to be an insouciant social creature but really he’s most comfortable sitting alone with a drink and a book. He is relaxed, even though the bar is on Hawaii and Hawaii is under attack in the latest local skirmish in the neverending war of the next century. Soon his equilibrium is disturbed by a call from his mother, ordering him off the island before it goes boom. 

That call throws Jiang Liu into a surreal action adventure. When he’s not dodging space rocks or continental warships, he’s fighting with his opposite number Qi Fei. Qi Fei heads a military research institute and chooses iron discipline over good times. He thinks competition is the ultimate drive of human civilisation – ‘The victor writes the history of the universe.’ At first, Jiang Liu and Qi Fei don’t get on at all. Their powerful backers have urged each man to kill the other. They spend a lot of time fighting – with AIs, weapons and martial arts. There is a particularly entertaining scene when Qi Fei arrests Jiang Liu and takes him into military custody, only for Jiang Liu to escape the base. When Jiang Liu and Qi Fei aren’t fighting, they’re debating – about philosophy, civilisations, religion, politics. Sometimes they fight and debate at the same time. Their developing relationship with all its bickering and slapstick becomes endearing.

‘I showed him shadows of the debates between philosophers of the hundred schools of thought,’ says Ying Zheng, the first emperor of China. Why he appears in a novel set around 2180 is something for you at home to find out. But debate is the second chamber of this book’s dual engine. Jiang Liu and Qi Fei meet an archaeologist, Yun Fan, who is convinced that a colossal and sophisticated alien ship has noticed the Earth and is gliding slowly towards it. (Her explanation for how she knows this is very sciency, involving pulsar emissions, but the effect is achieved – you feel like you’re watching the vibrating cup in Jurassic Park.) Jiang Liu is apprehensive, for ‘If the aliens were hostile, Earth could not possibly come out ahead in such a conflict.’

As our protagonists fly out to space to find the alien ship, the story takes on a series of conceptual and narrative leaps – it seems spoilery to reveal these developments, but they seem like completely natural progressions in the realm of the novel. Brace yourself, it involves a lot of the debate I mentioned. There is more disquisition here than you’d find in a nineteenth century French novel. But the discourses are not just about the external universe but also the shadows of the heart and means of communication. Hao Jingfang offers the only description I ever read of mind linking that doesn’t sound completely awful.

The aliens aren’t here to gobble everybody up. They are offering something transformative – thrown into relief by our apprehensions of the planet our protagonists come from. The world is divided into an Atlantic and a Pacific Alliance which are constantly at war with each other. Poverty and ruin seems to be the Earth norm. (Yun Fan tells the crew about ‘when she lived in the tenant hives clustered under the maglev highway ramps’ – a brief phrase that seems to conjur multitudes.) Earth is in what the aliens call ‘The Age of Expansion’ – defined as the point where ‘a civilisation believes it is the master of all that it surveys, when it feels itself the centre of the universe and refuses to accept teachings from anyone.’ When our protagonists leave the alien ship, they are immediately assailed by warships representing the two military alliances from Earth, both fighting to capture the alien craft for themselves, culminating in a fantastic denouement at the UN building, of all places. 

A final high point is the translation by Ken Liu. His explanatory foreword, translating this novel from a language so unlike my own, gave me a new appreciation for the translator’s role in the publishing process. He writes: ‘Years of standardised testing have honed the contemporary Anglophone reader’s skill in inferring the meaning of unfamiliar words from context, and should that prove insufficient, the search engine is waiting right there on the personal tracking devices we’ve all agreed to carry with us 24/7. In the age of Google and Wikipedia, there’s simply no reason to avoid the importation of new words.’