Rajaniemi's fiction is the biggest, most ambitious work of visioning I've encountered since Sterling's Schismatrix. Master thief Jean Le Flambeur has escaped from Mars with more of his memories, on a course for the Jinn-haunted deserts of Earth to steal the childhood of a God. But the universe is a terrifying place, and great powers that imprison souls, enslave minds, and blast holes in space-time are on the same path as Le Flambeur, and immortality and death are two sides of the same bad bargain.

I simply can't describe this book, but if you like your writing lyrical, your scifi hard, your physics mixed with philosophy, and don't mind a hefty dose of confusion, you need to read this series.

****

The Fractal Prince is structurally more ambitious than the first book, moving back and forth across time and introducing Tawaddud as a narrator, a young woman from an important family on Earth who has fallen from power to become the girl who loves only monsters. Earth is a more deadly backwater than Mars. The catastrophes which rocked the system left the planet haunted by Wildcode, rogue nanotech that corrupts bodies with crystal intrusions and causes computers to glitch, and mind-stealing AI, among the more comprehensible dangers. The survivors live in the shattered ruins of a fallen O'Neill space habitat, mining the desert for rogue gogol AI-minds to sell to the powers of the Sobornost. Jean's target is the childhood backup of the most fearsome of the Sobornost Founders, a group of near-gods who aim for immortality, at the cost of enslaving every mind in the system to their will. The heist is less solid than the first book, but the 1001 Arabian Nights inspired post collapse human culture is still stylish as all hell.