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A review by mburnamfink
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
5.0
This book a rare thing in contemporary scifi-gleeful. Sure, the solar system is riven by war between godlike Founders wielding billions of enslaved minds guiding self-replicating nanoweaponry, software swords, and strangelet bombs that make Hiroshima look like a firecracker (among the more comprehensible weapons), and history is a lie, and running out of Time on Mars can kill you, but the story is fun!
I don't think I've seen such a well-realized universe in a long time. Farsighted yet realistic extrapolations in physics, cryptography, and nanoscale engineering give the universe a strong surface for the play of legendary thief Jean le Flambeur, the Oortian warrior princess Miele, and freelance detective Isidore. The first two chapters were a little hard for me, but once I made it through that I took in the book in one excited lope towards the explosive conclusion. The Martian culture of the Oubliette was exotic and very real (a sixth sense for privacy rights!?). A few parts of the book, particular the Zoku refugees, seemed a little too cute for what was otherwise a very grounded story, but these are minor quibbles.
if you like space opera, scifi, and fun, you owe it to yourself to read this book!
****
So on a reread for 2018, and in light of my vague memories of the rest of the series, I'm less sure about The Quantum Thief. Rajaniemi's day job is as some kind of computational quantum physicist, and the densely layered jargon still holds it charm, picturing a solar system where cognitive, computation, and new states of matter have merged to create a post-Singularity culture. The Powers That Be in this setting are very very powerful indeed, the next best thing to gods, standing on centuries of accumulated wealth, power and secrets.
And yet it's hard to a square a universe where these entities exist, with one in which more ordinary baseline humans care about chocolate, and wine, and the simple joys of a con. Beneath the flashy jargon, Jean le Flambeur is a cipher, the human triangle at the heart of the book not quite holding at the corners.
I don't think I've seen such a well-realized universe in a long time. Farsighted yet realistic extrapolations in physics, cryptography, and nanoscale engineering give the universe a strong surface for the play of legendary thief Jean le Flambeur, the Oortian warrior princess Miele, and freelance detective Isidore. The first two chapters were a little hard for me, but once I made it through that I took in the book in one excited lope towards the explosive conclusion. The Martian culture of the Oubliette was exotic and very real (a sixth sense for privacy rights!?). A few parts of the book, particular the Zoku refugees, seemed a little too cute for what was otherwise a very grounded story, but these are minor quibbles.
if you like space opera, scifi, and fun, you owe it to yourself to read this book!
****
So on a reread for 2018, and in light of my vague memories of the rest of the series, I'm less sure about The Quantum Thief. Rajaniemi's day job is as some kind of computational quantum physicist, and the densely layered jargon still holds it charm, picturing a solar system where cognitive, computation, and new states of matter have merged to create a post-Singularity culture. The Powers That Be in this setting are very very powerful indeed, the next best thing to gods, standing on centuries of accumulated wealth, power and secrets.
And yet it's hard to a square a universe where these entities exist, with one in which more ordinary baseline humans care about chocolate, and wine, and the simple joys of a con. Beneath the flashy jargon, Jean le Flambeur is a cipher, the human triangle at the heart of the book not quite holding at the corners.