The Quantum Thief is a debut science fiction novel by Hannu Rajaniemi, published in 2010 to general applause for its post singularity experimental concepts and near lyrical writing style.
The eponymous character, Jean Le Flambeur, is in an unusual prison ruled by game theory and hence he and another prisoner face each other daily with weapons and Jean is killed each time – virtually. And this is the crux. Much of the setting and characters in the novel are in a telepathic state – so to speak. For example, imagine walking down a street while running a kind of Facebook in your head. You can change your privacy settings by thinking about them using different levels of data access to strangers and friends at will. Called a gevulot, this is a key feature to this far post-human society, ruled by god-like (but not Gods) post human / alien entities, who play game theory moves with whole planets. Earth human survivors of some apocalyptic event eke out a semi-virtual life in a moving city (not that dissimilar to the one in Christopher Priest’s Inverted World) called the Oubliette on Mars.
The plot is a twisted heist. The thief is sprung from the Dilemma Prison near Neptune by a winged woman, from the Oort Cloud in the outer Solar System, called Mieli (Finnish for mind) because she needs his special quantum thievery skills to steal something for her employer. Jean, pleased to be sprung, could abscond after getting out of prison but is honour-bound to help Mieli. First he has to go to the Oubliette on Mars to find parts of his missing memory that a former version of himself hid in nine other persons / entities. After that – which takes most of the novel – he can focus on the main mission, which is rather unclear, but involves finding a box and revealing who really controls the minds of the population after their Time runs out and they become Quiets.
The novel is very clever. There are many inventions from the way hand-to-hand combat takes place to the use of Time as currency. If anything the book bulges with too many new ideas – or new uses of older ideas and reflects the influence of Charles Stross in Hannu’s writing group.
Some aspects of the book were clumsy for me – the moving city walks on stilts that have to be maintained by uploaded consciousnesses of those whose bodies run out of time, until earned again. The phoboi (disgruntled robots varying in size from nano to mega) attacks the city, which is barely defended. These are minor distractions for me. I enjoy puzzles and there are many.
The writing borders on lyrical and although I get the feeling the author has his tongue firmly in his cheek, I enjoyed the ephemeral feel of the whole book and especially the near telepathic party of the Zoku.
I commend the book as a science fiction – hard? Possibly although many aspects are fantasy too.
The problem with me as a writer reading other books is that my brain is in overdrive rewriting the plots and characters. Hence after I’d read The Quantum Thief I thought a section of the Oubliette was a telepathic city. Ie that it only existed in the minds of people not there. I liked that idea so much it stayed with me for days – it still does – but on re-reading the novel, it wasn’t really like that. Haha. I should write it quick.
The Chester Science Fiction book group TEBS discussed the novel and those who’d read it enjoyed most aspects of it even though we each took something different from it. An aspect of the subjective nature of reading that happens with all books but especially with the more complex yet satisfying plots such as The Quantum Thief.
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Voted best SF novel 2012. ARIA has infectious amnesia!
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