I also finished the audiobook of Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang over the weekend; a story about a colonized and independent Mars experiencing growing pains. Big spoilers ahead.
-The book focuses on a Mars 40 years after winning a war for independence. The author paints, at first, a utopia where science and sanity rule, communities work together, and artistic or scientific works are openly shared and celebrated. We see much of this through the eyes of a visiting artist who quickly falls in love with the open nature of Mars' central archive and investigates his mentor's time in Mars city many years ago.
The primary perspective is that of Luoying, daughter of the Consul of Mars, who has just recently returned from a 5 year educational stay on Earth with several other youths (dubbed the Mercury Group). Loving both worlds she finds herself unable to fit in with the lifestyles of either: the profit and patent-obsessed future Earth or the highly restrictive-yet-productive life expected of martians. She and her colleagues feel they're vagabonds that don't truly belong anywhere.
As the story progresses the author peels back the layers of Mars, exposing the politics, its history, and its deep-rooted philosophies until we get to see the full picture. It isn't a fast story by any stretch; it's a slow burn from start to end as ideas are slowly examined from several sides through the eyes of our young and confused protagonist.
While Luoying is, in theory, an excellent perspective from which to explore the world-building in the novel as we make discoveries alongside her, her own confusion feels like it gets in the way of the goings-on as she meanders between halfhearted goals and ideas. Her inability to decide what to do is, I suppose, the essence of "the vagabond", and in line with what the author is trying to convey, but as a result it was hard to see the point of the book at times. I don't think "sometimes people don't know what they want to do" and "history repeats itself" novel enough ideas to build a whole sci-fi universe to convey.
And there is more here than that -- the author has jammed a lot of philosophical and social experiments into Vagabonds -- but since so much of it is conveyed through the eyes and thoughts of angry and confused youths, I felt we didn't get very deep explorations into these things.
Arguably the best part of the book happens in "Part 3", where the author takes all the characters we've only seen through Luoying's eyes and gives us a taste of their perspectives as everything comes to a head. In this segment I think Vagabonds really shines and explores some interesting ideas and perspectives that build on the stories and world the author constructed and give some closure to several questions.
I really loved the world and characters that Hao Jingfeng built in this book, but wish she did more with them. I thoroughly enjoyed their visions of Mars and future Earth as science fiction worlds, and her exploration of the generation gap between Mars' aging war heros and angry youth was interesting. However, the slow burn wasn't worth the effort, and even though things got interesting near the end of the book it wasn't enough to justify the slow meandering build up.
There may be something here for you if you're looking for a slow, slightly whimsical, occasionally poetic journey through space, but I didn't find what I was looking for in this one.