The Quantum Thief [Hardcover]

Hannu Rajaniemi (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 10, 2011

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy— from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. Now he’s confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.

Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turnedsingularity lights the night. What Mieli offers is the chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self—in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.

As Jean undertakes a series of capers on behalf of Mieli and her mysterious masters, elsewhere in the Oubliette investigator Isidore Beautrelet is called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, and finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur….

The Quantum Thief is a crazy joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people communicating by sharing memories, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as MMORPG guild members. But for all its wonders, it is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge, and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.

 

The Quantum Thief is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Science Fiction & Fantasy title.

 

One of Library Journal's Best SF/Fantasy Books of 2011

Editorial Reviews

Review

“ The next big thing in hard SF. Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am.” —Charles Stross

“ Many an anglophone author would kill to turn out prose half as good as this…. Reminiscent of the work of Alfred Bester, who produced two of the finest American SF books of the 1950s, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.” —The Financial Times

“ A brilliant first novel. The Quantum Thief, like so much of the best space opera of this century, is a prodigy house, where propositions are instant heritage, and arguments are eyeclick.” —John Clute

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

Thirty-year-old HANNU RAJANIEMI is from Finland and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is a director of a think tank providing business services based on advanced math and artificial intelligence. He holds a Ph.D. in string theory and is a member of the same writing group that produced Hal Duncan. He wrote The Quantum Thief in English.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (May 10, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765329492
• ISBN-13: 978-0765329493
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (141 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #291,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

197 of 214 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Clever (if challenging) hard SF December 27, 2010

By J. Shurin VINE™ VOICE

Format:Kindle Edition

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi is one of this year's most celebrated debuts - a complex science fiction mystery set on a far-future Mars. Part crime, part espionage, part action thriller and all jam-packed with imaginative technology, The Quantum Thief is a daring and intricately-constructed adventure.

The plot follows, mostly, the thief Jean le Flambeur. Jean is freed from his infinite, game-theory -riddled space prison by Mieli a winged-cyber-ninja. Mieli is on a mission and needs Jean's help. Unfortunately, Jean is only a mere shadow of his former self. Before he can help out Mieli and steal something, he needs to sort himself out. His foxy robo-angel reluctantly in tow, Jean heads to Mars to find fragments of his own memory.

Meanwhile, Mars is a proper SF wonderland, with more shiny baubles than a Christmas tree. Martians (such as they are, being human) live on time - bought, borrowed or earned. When they're out of time, they go Quiet, and are put to work terraforming or doing some other form of manual labour in a temporary monstrous form. The entire Martian society is based on a system of gevulot - shared memories. You don't tell people things as much as politely agree to mutually recall a something they hadn't experienced yet. There's no history, just "exo-memory" that exists outside of individual perspective and recall.

The whole culture is so bizarre that the Sobornost, the super-technical beings that have already taken over pretty much everything, aren't even bothering to conquer Mars. It basically isn't worth the effort of figuring out what they're on about. Not to say that Mars is only for Martians: there's also an exiled colony of "zoku", post-human gamer geeks and the mysterious phoboi, strange emotional critters that skirt the edge of the city, looking for prey.

Into this mess plummet Jean and Mieli. He refuses to do anything in a straightforward way when he could set six nesting plots up to do (almost) the same thing. And she really just doesn't give a flying damn about the entire thing, as long as she gets to punch something occasionally. Mieli is caught between a strange fascination for the hyperactive Jean and a desperate frustration that he takes so long to do anything. Her lover is caught somewhere, and until she finishes her mission, she can't save her.

All of this would be infinitely more interesting if the reader was allowed to care about any of the characters. Instead, the very language of the text prevents any sort of connection from taking place. Constantly I would be brought to the very brink of tension, only to learn that there are flashes in the spimescape or that, god forbid, the q-dots have failed or there's gogol-piracy going on. All of which, to give the author credit, are somehow internally consistent and meticulously planned. Jean is constantly doing something that we're told is criminal genius, but, since I don't understand the how, why or what of it, I have only the author's extensive vocabulary as evidence.

Overall, I can genuinely understand the praise that Mr Rajaniemi has gathered for his impressive debut novel. It is flamboyantly intelligent, wildly intricate and clearly imaginative in ten thousand ways that I will never fully be able to appreciate. I also found it incredibly hard-going - there was neither a clear plot nor an empathetic character to which my reading could be anchored. Instead, every passage was an barrage of scientific vocabulary. Once deciphered, I could appreciate the author's intellect, but that got me no closer to actually enjoying the book.

52 of 57 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Complex Philosophical Sci-Fi April 20, 2011

By Kevin L. Nenstiel TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Posthuman acolyte Mieli springs notorious thief Jean le Flambeur from prison to complete a job with shifting goals and faceless enemies. But detective Isidore Beautrelet knows Jean's coming, and has every tool in his arsenal ready. If only the two of them knew how much they need each other, perhaps both could drop the shackles of life in Mars's moving city, the Oubliette, and recognize the truth daily life conceals.

Debut author Hannu Rajaniemi blends science fiction with Russian and French literature, Hebrew myth, and modern game theory to create a dreamscape that tests its characters (and readers) through constant frustration. The cityscape in which the characters fight shifts as fast as their goals and alliances. And their principal coin of exchange is deception, so every action rests on a foundation of half-truths and chicanery.

The story runs on questions of identity. If I can erase my past, who am I? Does life mean very much if death is only temporary? When people trade hours of life like stock certificates, does life mean you've spent time wisely, while death implies moral failure? If we make our own worlds, including our own morality, do we have a moral obligation to die? Does my existence matter if everything I know is a lie?

Everything gets called into question. Machines provide people artificially long lives, and the world is governed by shadowy agents like an Ayn Rand nightmare. But I can't tell of Rajaniemi advocates a viewpoint. Because hours of life are cash, accomplishment and wealth mean long life, while wastrels face early death--the ultimate libertarian paradise. We create value, and we live; we sponge off others, and we die.

But does that make this book a snow job? Maybe not. The climactic reveal (which I won't spoil) implies that this attitude is a collapse of civic order. Everyone in the Oubliette lives or dies by their willingness to follow the rules of an invisible panopticon. Maybe the rich live because they're broken, while the poor die because they're free. This could be a cautionary tale. Perhaps later volumes will explain.

This book wheels out complex ethical considerations of life in the ultimate zero-sum game. Marxist critics will have a field day. Beneath a surface of playful sci-fi, this book asks important questions about survival, work, meaning, life, and death. Rajaniemi asks: do we matter because we exist, or do we exist because we matter? And he offers no easy solutions. He just challenges us to join him in the discovery.

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars It won't hold your hand... May 10, 2011

By Justin Landon

Format:Kindle Edition

If The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes had a baby with The Lies of Locke Lamora and then gave it up for adoption to Neuromancer you would have a pretty good simulacrum for The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. The book is at its heart a whodunit, or more specifically which whodunit. After finishing the book I'm not sure who did it. But I think that's the point.

The novel begins when a winged woman who talks to god rescues an amnesiac thief named Jean Le Flambeur at the request of her deity and brings him to Mars to remember. Juxtaposing this perspective is the antagonist, Isidore Beautrelet, a detective akin to Sherlock himself who in solving the murder of a chocolatier finds himself set against le Flambeur himself. Told at a breakneck pace the story follows our thief and his winged caretaker as he infiltrates Martian society to rediscover who he was and who he wants to be.

Quantum Thief takes place primarily on a Mars colonized with mobile cities. Technology has evolved to the point the line between artificial intelligence and human intelligence has blurred and an individual's consciousness is no longer singular. Rajaniemi eschews information dumps, and as a result it's easily 200 pages before you have any real understanding of the world his character inhabit. Ideas and words like exomemory, gogols, and gevoluts are pretty abstract terms that he forces the reader to define only through context.

I would be lying if i said such a complex setting did not obscure the plot. Oftentimes concepts that are barely understood become important plot devices. Some might find this off putting, and at times it can be. Rajaniemi is writing an intelligent novel for intelligent readers. He is not going to hand hold, rather he expects that being dropped into the middle of ocean without a lifeboat is perfectly doable. By the novel's conclusion I think he's right.

Not taking the time to educate the reader Rajaniemi frees himself to focus on the story and the prose. The result is a beautifully written book with a compelling plot and interesting characters. More impressively, for a first novel it's extremely tight with very little wasted language. The story is mostly self contained, but ultimately it's just a snapshot in time of a larger story revealed in the epilogue.

In all, The Quantum Thief is one of the better debut novels I've read. Its pacing and crime fiction flavor could lend it appeal to cross genre readers. I look forward to Rajaniemi's subsequent novels.