The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur) Mass Market Paperback – January 31, 2012

Picking up The Quantum Thief reminded me a lot of the first time I read A Clockwork Orange, where there is so much unexplained slang that at first it seems barely comprehensible. But it's amazing how quickly you can pick up concepts from context, and pretty soon I was all over gevulot, exomemory, the quiet, gogols, and much more. As an aside, while Burgess drew heavily on Russian, Rajaniemi pulls words from Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and there is a glossary if you get stuck. I was rather surprised to encounter the word Yggdrasil again, having just read it in the Hyperion series.While I'm on comparisons, don't expect any exposition. On a scale from Ready Player One to Neuromancer, it's jammed right up at the Neuromancer end. It is disorienting, confusing, challenging and awesome. This is definitely a book that benefits from being read in large chunks. I was nibbling at it and had to constantly backtrack a few pages to pick up the story again.I have to admit to mostly ignoring the physics, I'm sure the references are exciting for quantum physicists, but I'm not particularly interested in constantly running to Google while I'm reading fiction. But there are plenty of other things to focus on, Rajaniemi has packed so many innovative ideas into the novel it's like he has been bottling them up for decades and had to get them all out in this debut novel.I particularly liked gevulot, this idea of crypto-backed privacy where, even during ordinary conversations, people exchange contracts with each other to govern how the other party sees you and how much of the conversation they are allowed to remember, made possible since all memory is stored in the city-wide exomemory."Even though the park is an open space, it is not an agora, and walking down the sandy pathways, they pass several gevulot-obscured people, their privacy fog shimmering...Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it - and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop."All residents of the Oubliette, the walking Martian city where the novel is set (!), are required to serve time as 'Quiet' where their virtual reality personality (gogol) is transferred into a machine and used in service to the city. As a result, time as a regular citizen becomes currency, there's a vaguely described but sinister threat outside the city, high-tech superheroes come-police, posthuman warrior clans descended from MMORPG clans, and a powerful collective with a universal proletarian Great Common Task. Not to mention a modern day Sherlock holmes and a heist. Like I said, lots of great ideas.Vague spoilers coming.So what's not to like? There's a point towards the end of the novel where the artful sequence of plot reveals steps out of mazes and shadows into an action-packed climax. This transition felt a little clumsy to me, and seemed fairly shallow after the mysterious build-up. The "Luke, I am your father" (and this is your mother and we're one exciting family) moment should have been cut entirely. Compared to the clever reveals earlier in the novel it was clumsy and cheesy.4.5 stars. of my reviews at g-readinglist.blogspot.com Read more

Think of this as a post-Singularity heist story. The main character is modeled after Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief from a series of stories by Maurice Leblanc. You don't need to know Lupin (or Lupin the Third) to appreciate the story—I certainly didn't.Rajaniemmi does a superb job imagining what life could be like for our digital descendants. While there are several "interludes" that assist the reader in understanding this world, Rajaniemmi throws the reader in the deep end of the pool from the start, forcing us to gather the meanings of new words from context in order to swim through the story. I'd imagine that plenty of readers have drowned along the way.The story starts with our hero, the gentleman thief, in a dilemma prison. Shortly thereafter, he's busted out of said prison, for a price, and whisked off to Mars to retrieve his memories. His rescuer/employer is Mieli, a woman who needs him to pull off a heist to rescue her lover, a secret she keeps hidden from him. The other major character is Isidore, a promising young detective in the mobile city of Oubilette on Mars. He starts off as a bit of a puppy dog, trying to please the tzadikkim, a group of highly respected vigilantes in the city, but gradually comes into his own.While some futurists will have you believe that the Singularity will bring paradise, Rajaniemmi posits a future where that certainly isn't the case. Equality is a lie. Some of those responsible for forging Creation 2.0 have granted themselves far greater powers for their uplifted minds than others. Rajaniemmi's new gods are just as capricious as the ancient ones, and their struggle for power always leaves mere mortals as collateral damage.The malleability of memory is an important theme running through the book. It seems that our digital descendants have a harder time with memory than our analog selves. While memories can be shared, it appears that they can be forged as well. While we've been struggling with disinformation on the internet the last few years, at least there's a way to uncover the truth. That doesn't seem so easy here when collective memories can be overwritten. The truth has never been so fragile.There are many interesting elements that I'm not going into such as time as currency, personality pirates, multi-level privacy shields, matter shaped by thought, death as a time of public service, and so on. Recommended for sci-fi fans looking for something challenging and different. I found myself re-reading parts to figure things out.

This took lots of pplause and award nominations on initial publication. I wanted to like it. I didn’t, much.It’s easy to see what all the fuss was about. It fairly fizzes with new ideas and for-all-I-know amazing riffs on high-frontier physics. The SF world is prone to being dazzled by shiny new things and this certainly fits that bill.Unfortunately, it’s all a bit Emperor’s New Clothes. Beneath all the post-human, quantum bollocks lies a fairly old-fashioned plot that isn’t all that far away from what Charles Harness and Alfred Bester were doing with more flair and depth some 70 years ago (there was one plot twist I spotted from about a million miles off, and I’m terrible at that sort of thing). At times it also reminded me of early Delany, but for all the wrong reasons, namely a tendency for the author to be all too obviously, and annoyingly, in love with his own characters, who aren’t actually all that interesting. Rajaniemi’s use of the present tense throughout the book makes sense, as it suggests the unpredictability and (quantum?) uncertainty of the world he portrays, but he’s not a good enough writer to avoid it becoming tiresome very quickly (though, to be fair, his English is outstanding for what I assume to be a non-native speaker). His opening chapter is particularly problematic. It’s a hoary old tradition for SF novels to drop the reader into a world of unfamiliar concepts and terminology. Rajaniemi does it to an extent never seen before. According to temperament, you could applaud him for his daring or beg him to stop showing off and just get on with it. I’m in the latter camp. Things do pick up after that, but it’s easy to understand why some readers gave up at that point, after their patience had been tried so much.My favourite SF is the kind that gives us an insight or perspective into ourselves and our society, a tradition that goes back all the way to Wells and even Mary Shelley. This offers nothing of the kind. It’s essentially a pretentious goodies versus baddies adventure enraptured with its own solipsistic puzzle-solving. I’ve given it three stars anyway because the inventiveness is quite remarkable, but ultimately it reminded me, strangely, of Quentin Tarantino: the work of a clearly talented creator, full of razzle-dazzle, invention and audacity, but with absolutely nothing to say.

There's a certain arrogance behind this book. While its a long way from perfect, there are some marvellous ideas and great world-building within it. However as a whole its undermined by a complete failure to temper the writing for the reader. Key concepts are not explained, and invented words and terminology are repeatedly used without their meaning being explained - not just in a few isolated instances but continuously and sometimes extremely densely within a single sentence. It can lead to an experience much like trying to read Camus - the sentences are grammatically structured but simply lack any cogent meaning because they are so packed with fabricated terms that haven't been explained. This doesn't make the book or the author clever, it makes it inconsiderate and dismissive of its audience. If you write a book, you are free to write it however you wish; however if you *sell* that book you enter into a contract with your reader to (in the case of fiction) entertain, enlighten. When your story is so badly distorted that it cannot be followed by the reader, an author has failed in their primary duty. I cannot recommend this book in its current form; I only wish it had been filtered through an editor that was less willing to deliver the "vision" of the author and more concerned with creating a narrative that is at the very least lucid, for all its cleverness. I am no idiot, and am very well read - this book is simply dismissive of the requirement for the reader to be able to follow its narrative.

I have mixed feelings about this book.The first chapters is a deluge of made up words and situations that make little sense.It is, by far, the worst writing I have ever seen.I read a few pages, then I dropped the book.Opened it again another day. Dropped after a few pages.Went on like that for a long while. It's THAT terrible.At some point, the writing becomes legible and I was able to start reading normally.However there are still occasioanal words and concepts that don't make much sense (phoboi, Quiet, Sobornost, etc..).The author has crafted whole worlds and societies, but there's never any background or context explained, you're going along with the character trying to make sense of the world around them.Everything comes together by the end of the book.I am having a hard time recommending this book.It's hard to rate. 0 star for the opening chapter, 5 star for the second half. (Let's average that to 3?)Definitely wouldn't recommend for one of your first SF novels. However if you're run out of books and you can bear through some unclear writing, there's an interesting world to discover!There are two more books in the trilogy. I have not decided whether I will buy the next volume.Noting it's not clear to me if they are a continuation of if they feature different characters/story.

This novel created a lot of buzz in 2010 when it first came out, with people citing it as the SF debut of the year, so of course I was curious. I got myself a copy. In true Slow Reader form, I didn't actually read the thing until a year or two later. So, let's see what all the fuss is (was) about then, eh?The Quantum Thief concerns the exploits of master thief Jean le Flambeur. Imprisoned in the beginning of the story, he is promptly jailbroken by a mysterious warrior lady on behalf of a mysterious employer for mysterious reasons. The official reason, as explained to the thief, is that they require his kleptomaniacal services to steal something from a walking city on Mars, somewhere he lived in a previous life as a master criminal, yet the memories of which are long gone from his mind.This premise sounds simple, but I assure you the book is not. What strikes you most about this novel is that, on first reading, the language is almost impenetrable. Rajaniemi's style is to avoid info-dumps almost entirely, leaving it up to the reader to keep up and try to figure things out gradually (or with the help of Wikipedia). Much terminology is introduced and used as it would be in the world, a matter of course without need for explanation, but of course this makes for incredibly frustrating reading as one doesn't really understand what the hell's going on. What's a gogol? What's this "exomemory"? Who are the Sobornost? What the hell is happening???But about half way through, everything clicks.Once this happens, the book becomes hard to put down. The story, the teased and dense backstory, the gradual drips of information revealing the great mystery behind everything all keep you coming back for more, provided that you've made the effort to understand the concepts that Rajaniemi is attempting to get across. Many interesting themes are covered, such as personal privacy and posthumanism. There is plenty of action and drama. The prose is often inspired and often frustratingly esoteric in equal measure, but a pleasure to read all the time. Rajaniemi has an obvious academic pedigree in science and isn't afraid to use it, making for some perplexing paragraphs for those not quite in the know (including me). Part of the genius of the book is that there is enough plot, action and character (often rare commodities in hard SF novels) to not let the scientific details detract from the reader's enjoyment.That's not to say that this book isn't challenging. If you want to read it, prepare to be a bit miffed by the first half, but the reward is great if you can stick with it. I would recommend re-reading the first half after you've finished though. I'd give it a 10 out of 10, but I'll take a mark off due to the lack of glossary (I enjoyed the challenge, but still...).A great read, best I've read in a while.9/10

I really tried but I was expected to know too much too soon. It’s almost like a second book when you had previously figured out how that universe works so little information is needed.The other thought was if felt like it was originally written in French then translated.Sorry not for me.