But Rajaniemi fills the book with setting-specific neologisms and technology based on scientific theory that hasn’t yet percolated through the mainstream. Similarly, the outline of the plot’s easy to see. And then beyond that the book throws in references to an idiosyncratic blend of classic and pop literature: Gogol, Proust, the Justice League.
You can see this character in Raffles or perhaps the French pulp character Fantomas, and in science fiction in Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat and Walter Jon Williams’ tales of Drake Majistral. But then it also plays with another lineage, older than sf, one at least as old as Robin Hood: the righteous outlaw thief. Banks and Warren Ellis and Charles Stross. Clarke, fusing precise language and dramatic plots with a sense of the sublime clothed in scientific theory a lineage that passes through writers like Bester, Brunner, and Gibson (the hard-as-nails female warrior guarding the male mission specialist is very Neuromancer), up through Iain M. It’s primarily, I think, within a lineage that goes back at least to Arthur C. But on the other it’s highly traditional, drawing from different lineages within the genre and outside it. On the one hand it’s aggressively bleeding-edge, incorporating quantum theory and game theory and any number of up-to-the-nanosecond science-fictional ideas.
Uncertainty and possibility and identity are key themes in this book appropriate, then, that its own identity is somewhat paradoxical. That’s a basic description of Hannu Rajaniemi’s novel The Quantum Thief, the first in a series following le Flambeur’s adventures (the second, The Fractal Prince, will be coming later this year). A youthful detective, hi-tech superheroes, and posthuman intelligences are waiting to complicate his task, which seems to have ramifications on an interplanetary scale.
There, he must regain old memories he locked away from all possible recovery when he was literally a far different person than he is now. Until he’s freed by a violent woman named Mieli from the edge of the solar system, and taken to Mars. Tor Books (A Tom Doherty Associates Book 330 pp, $24.99 USD, $28.99 CDN hardcover 2010)Ĭenturies in the future, Jean le Flambeur is a master thief, imprisoned in a virtual-reality jail: every day he makes choices, and dies, and is reborn.
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