One of my favourite thought experiments is to stand slightly back, look at our present-day world, and wonder “How would I explain this to a person from the 16th Century?” Because so much of our lives today would be incomprehensible to even a reasonably well-educated (by the standards of the day) person, I find this an intriguing exercise. And so I looked at the utter weirdness of so much of the setting of The Quantum Thief and I felt like that 16th Century person.
Still, that’s what I started reading science fiction for, and so I wasn’t disappointed. Most of what Rajaniemi puts into the book becomes clear with time; what doesn’t come clear is most likely a setup for the next novel in the series. What we have here is a post-human heist caper, mainly set in a mobile city on the surface of Mars. A lot of the city’s style and habits seem lifted from 19th Century Paris, but there are elements of Russian folklore and a few nods to the author’s own Finnish heritage as well. The story switches between Jean le Flambeur, the thief of the title, and a detective, Isidore Beautrelet, whose stories become interlinked; it moves along at a fair pace, although about three quarters of the way in, a new character was introduced almost out of nowhere and I did stumble slightly. But the pace soon picked up again, and we were led to a spectacular, if slightly confusing, climax. (Well, confusing if you haven’t been paying attention, or weren’t aware of the meaning of words like ‘panopticon’ or ‘oubliette’…)
I found the second book, The Fractal Prince, to be as excitingly incomprehensible as the first, although from time to time – especially from about mid-way through – plot reveals surfaced that could actually be related back to our own time and world, or something recognisably close to it. This time round, we see Earth in the aftermath of some sort of cataclysmic war between AIs and uploaded consciousnesses. The boundaries between real and virtual worlds are even more blurred than in The Quantum Thief. There are more characters in play here as well, though identities are fairly fluid and people do not always turn out to be who they say they are.
(I have to admit that I kept wanting to read “jinn jar” [a portable device for holding a disembodied consciousness] as “jam jar” which gave me an amusing mix of images.)
I suspect there are two ways to read this book; either work carefully through it, trying to unpick the actual meaning of each of the plot devices, or blast straight through, glossing over the weirdness and enjoying the story-telling and the characters. I took the second route and was fascinated by all the strangeness even though I wasn’t following every twist and turn of the text – a bit like listening to an opera in a foreign language that you don’t fully understand but enjoying the tunes anyway.
These books will not be to everyone’s taste, but I enjoyed both of them. I have yet to read the final book in the trilogy, The Causal Angel.
Deep Waters Reading 