It's the year 2190 when Hao Jingfang's novel VAGABONDS begins, and it does not require the perusal of many paragraphs before the reader realizes that this book is very much social commentary on the conflicts of life on Earth in 2019-2020. One hundred years have passed since the life-changing war on our planet; now Martians are simply former Earthlings whose ideas about how society should operate are different from those There are famous people, power-hungry people, partying young adults, negotiations for needed supplies between nations, and on and on. Very familiar territory. The big difference is that negotiations and concerns for survival involve life on different planets, one of which is Mars. As spaceships shuttle back and forth, the Martians (former Earthlings) contemplate life with all of the same issues as we have today. The cover and premise of the book are interesting, but there was something about the third person narration that seemed very stilted to me, as if I were reading a generic history textbook.