The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Mar 31, 2013 Nicky rated it really liked it

Shelves: queer, speculative-fiction

The Quantum Thief is hard SF with a bit of a detective story and a heist story running as subroutines. I really enjoyed it, though it's in no way a book to read if you're feeling lazy. The world is built by showing you the things in it; you learn about things from context. This makes it hard to guess the plot ahead of time, because you don't know all the rules.

The characters were less intriguing than the plot and world; I'm interested in The Fractal Prince because I want to know how this plays o ...more

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Sep 10, 2018 Kara Babcock rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018-read, science-fiction, artificial-intelligence, from-library, posthuman, mystery

A long time ago I read The Dervish House and commented that it hacked my brain, and that’s what I feel like Hannu Rajaniemi is trying to do with The Quantum Thief. This is posthumanist SF that reimagines the limitations and extent of a human’s personal narrative in a very extreme, mind-bending way. I don’t entirely understand what’s happening here, and that is kind of the point. Rajaniemi walks an extremely fine line between avoiding infodumps and exposition and entirely losing the reader—bu A long time ago I read The Dervish House and commented that it hacked my brain, and that’s what I feel like Hannu Rajaniemi is trying to do with The Quantum Thief. This is posthumanist SF that reimagines the limitations and extent of a human’s personal narrative in a very extreme, mind-bending way. I don’t entirely understand what’s happening here, and that is kind of the point. Rajaniemi walks an extremely fine line between avoiding infodumps and exposition and entirely losing the reader—but it’s a line he walks well, and if you don’t mind that sort of thing, then this book is very enjoyable.

The story begins with a prison break and ends with a nearly apocalyptic scenario on Mars. Jean le Flambeur is/was a renowned, brilliant thief. He is trapped in a “Dilemma Prison”, a posthuman scenario where one literally acts out the Prisoner’s Dilemma all day, every day, earning points to avoid total, permanent oblivion. Mieli breaks Jean out of this prison so he can do a job for her—but first they need to retrieve some of his identity, which he left behind in memories on the Oubliette, a society in Mars that is ultra concerned about privacy and memory. There, Jean and Mieli get embroiled in local politics, discovering that Jean has a much more intimate connection to the history of the Oubliette than he’d like to admit.

The core of The Quantum Thief, as with a lot of great science fiction, is a question of identity. What makes you, you? Is it your body? Because this is a world where your body is mutable and in flux. Mieli’s body is enhanced from “baseline” with tech from the Sobornost, one of the many posthuman factions descended from baseline humanity. She constructs a similar body for the Jean she breaks out of prison—one that she ultimately has “root access” over. This is a world where nanotech has become q-tech—technology on the quantum level, “q dot” atoms that one can manipulate with the mind. And those human minds run as software on wetware platforms, able to become enhanced (computationally or physically) on demand. I haven’t even touched on the zoku or the citizens of the Oubliette yet!

Don’t worry about feeling overwhelmed, though. You will be way past overwhelmed. In some ways I’m reminded of William Gibson’s approach to cyberpunk stories: just toss the reader in the deep end, and let them figure out all these new terms. Whether it’s jacking and cyberspace or gevulot and spime, SF is replete with a plethora of new vocabulary. It isn’t what one invents that’s important: it’s how one uses it. Rajaniemi deploys this vocabulary expertly to make one feel like the alien visitor to this place. It reminds me a little of how Ursula K. Le Guin uses words, particularly in her Hainish stories, although Rajaniemi has obviously amped it up to a level that is, perhaps, unsustainable depending on your point of view.

Honestly, the actual plot of The Quantum Thief is so-so. It was hard for me to care all that much about Jean’s personal quest to recover his lost self, because I didn’t know that lost self, nor do we spend much time getting to know this Jean before he gets involved in these quagmire of quantum identities. Similarly, Mieli is mostly a cipher. We’re given to understand she has bargained with an entity farther up the posthuman chain of being, whom we only know for most of the book as “the pellegrini”, and that she hopes to be reunited with a lover one day. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Rajaniemi’s distaste for exposition extends to both personal and social backstories, and that makes for a slightly less rich reading experience. I don’t necessarily expect a far-future SF author to explain how their tech works—that’s just asking for disappointing technobabble. Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for learning more about the history of a society and how it came to be.

The Quantum Thief is a gorgeous tapestry of science fictional literature. It’s the kind of thing you have to want to revel in and work at—but it doesn’t act all stuffy and stuck up and pretend to be better than other books for all of that. It is, at its heart, a story of detectives and criminals and rebels and thieves; it is pulp wrapped in words and philosophy, kind of making it the best of both worlds. Yes, a great deal of it will be incomprehensible, at least for a while. If that isn’t your cup of tea, you should probably just avoid this book—if you read the first chapter, or even the first page, and feel lost, it won’t get that much better. And that’s OK. If you are all right with skimming along the surface of this pond, plunging only occasionally into its depths and then coming back up for air, then you are in for a treat.

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Nov 19, 2010 Ryandake rated it it was ok · review of another edition

wow, i so wanted to like this book. and it's not all bad--loads of interesting scientific/technological concepts and gizmos, a complicated plot, a future very different from the ones we can easily extrapolate from the present.

but the jargon... o lordy. the jargon was cruel. you need an exomemory just for the jargon.

i read a lot of sf--toss me in a book where i have to work to understand, i'm a happy camper. but toss me in a book where i need a wikipedia glossary to understand, i am not such a ha ...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Suz rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, book-club, award-winner, library, lets-go-to-mars

I really wanted to like this book a lot. But, I can't really like a book a lot that requires me to look online to make sure I'm understanding things correctly. I appreciate that this book is complicated, I appreciate that this book doesn't info-dump and is generally pretty streamlined. I had a bit of a time figuring out what all of the jargon and names (races, clones, etc) were, because there was only more jargon framing them. And while I like intelligent books and actually exercising my brain, ...more

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Dec 29, 2010 This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, cyberpunk, own, fiction

The Quantum Thief is a very confusing book. In some ways it makes me think of something Philip K. Dick would have written if he actually had known anything about science and quantum physics.

Some of the confusion is purposeful and a lot of clarity is gradually gained as the book goes on, but even at the end it felt like there were a lot of things I simply didn't understand or missed in the convolution of the writing and logic. There were also a few cases where it felt like the author simply acci The Quantum Thief is a very confusing book. In some ways it makes me think of something Philip K. Dick would have written if he actually had known anything about science and quantum physics.

Some of the confusion is purposeful and a lot of clarity is gradually gained as the book goes on, but even at the end it felt like there were a lot of things I simply didn't understand or missed in the convolution of the writing and logic. There were also a few cases where it felt like the author simply accidentally left out some basic bit of plot but then later keeps referring back to a scene/action that never occurred within his own narrative (I actually went back and reread a specific section three times to be sure...it just isn't there).

This may be one of those books that simply requires two readings. I suspect if I were to sit down and reread the book immediately, I would pick up quite a bit more of the nuance and understand quite a bit more of what is going on from the beginning. Even so, I'm fairly certain there are aspects of the concept I just wouldn't quite be able to wrap my brain around, perhaps because the author is being too subtle or couching the logic in language or quantum theory that most of us just aren't familiar with. The book is filled with a tremendous amount of jargon, much of it invented (I think) for the book. Quite a bit of it is explained as the book progresses, but it is partly what makes the earlier chapters harder to follow since much of the jargon precedes the eventual explanation.

It should be noted that the book is apparently also just the first volume of a series (length unknown). A major plot point is that there is a planned theft, but the object to be stolen is never even described or discussed (sort of a virtual MacGuffin, I suppose, which in and of itself is somewhat ironic), but apparently is still to be pursued in the future. The somewhat out of place ending also very clearly sets up the basic concept for a sequel, with a few of the main characters continuing but likely in a completely new setting.

Overall the book is clever, but perhaps overly so, sacrificing clarity for concept. While not in any way a work of humor, there are scattered humorous elements in the writing, more-or-less tongue-in-cheek jokes that the knowledgeable reader might pick up on and appreciate, although by no means the focus of the work. It's certainly an interesting read, but lacks something I personally look for in the very best of reads. ...more

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Apr 02, 2012 Rushi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, 2012

Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief is delightful yet difficult science fiction. It is Mr. Rajaniemi's debut novel and it is set in a world that is quite unlike most of what we find in contemporary science fiction.

The plot centers around Jean Le Flambeur, the titular "Quantum Thief". The plot begins with Le Flambeur being broken out of a (delightfully conceived) prison by a mysterious warrior and embarking on a quest that centers around Le Flambeur's past. The action moves on to a fascinating movin ...more

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Nov 23, 2012 Daniel Roy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, br-bookclub

The Quantum Thief is post-Singularity transhumanism going on a Technicolor wire-fu wall-to-wall swashbuckling adventure. It's post-humanity finally letting its hair down for a bit of fun.

Quantum Thief reminded me of a lot of my favorite SF settings, and mostly in a positive light. There's something of the French bande dessinée SF masterworks on display here, most notably Jean Giraud or, one of my favorites, Godard and Ribera's The Vagabond of Limbo. The city of Oubliette is a rejoinder to other ...more

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