Hannu Rajaniemi
Is The Quantum Thief by Finnish debut novelist and Scotland-based string theorist Hannu Rajaniemi as big of a deal as everyone is making it out to be? Yes. It is. And I almost didn't even read it.
When I took what was at the time an indefinite reviewing hiatus a few months back, I contacted most of the publishers that periodically sent me review copies to inform them that that they no longer needed to do so. Everyone got the message except apparently for the kind folks at Tor. For months, I continued to get several books a week from one person or another at the science fiction publishing juggernaut, all of which went unread and unreviewed.
Even though I've since started reviewing again, I wasn't really inclined to read this book because I've got such a large backlog of reading material already. While the publicity materials that accompanied the book lauded it as "the most exciting SF-adventure debut in years," this had absolutely no effect on me because, frankly, publicists have lost almost all credibility in my eyes when they make statements like this. This is especially true with respect to the fantasy genre, but it is also true to a lesser extent in the science fiction world. What did catch my attention, however, was the nearly universal praise that the book has garnered from my fellow bloggers. Their praise was enough to get me through the door and once I started reading, I blazed through the book in record time. I don't think I'll ever say this again, but this book is exactly what its publicist claims it to be.
The Quantum Thief is the story of renowned thief Jean le Flambeur, who when we first find him is securely imprisoned in a Dilemma Prison somewhere near Neptune. Here, in a series of glass-walled cells that branch infinitely in all directions, for the pleasure of his captors he is forced to repeatedly act out deadly confrontations with his neighbors as part of a sort of neverending game theory engine. Soon, though, he is rescued by Mieli (who hales from the Oort Cloud) and her sentient ship Perhonen, who after another narrow escape seek to enlist his help with a new bit of thieving on behalf of Mieli's employer. Before that can happen, however, he has to retrieve his memory.
This takes him to the moving Martian city known as the Oubliette--part of a terraforming effort commenced long ago--where most of the book takes place. Oubliette society is complex and a large part of its unique culture can be attributed to the interplay between the omniscient exomemory and the counterbalancing system of privacy controls known as gevulot. Exomemory records everything that occurs in the Oubliette necessitating the creation of gevulot, a system of controls that allows people to determine how much of themselves is available to whom. Another central pillar of Oubliette society is the fact that time is the currency of the realm. Once a person's time has expired, the person becomes a Quiet, which means that their soul is placed into one of a number of different bodies and they are then set to work performing maintenance and other menial tasks for the benefit of the Oubliette. These and numerous other facts, along with the general expertise with which Mr. Rajaniemi has painted the Oubliette, make the Oubliette one of the more interesting locals I've encountered in recent memory.
One fact that immediately confronts the reader is that this book is full of references to technologies and ideas that are not explained right away. This is a work of hard science fiction and Mr. Rajaniemi has elected to immerse his readers head first into his solar system without laying much groundwork. While this can be a little disorienting at first and may put more than a few readers off, those that survive the initial shock will likely conclude that the book would have lost some of its power had Mr. Rajaniemi elected an alternate course. The book also contains numerous references to real life persons, locales, and ideas throughout. For those who wish that the book had come with a glossary, there is one available here. It does contain spoilers though so I recommend not consulting it until you have read the book.
A lot of books that are this ambitious from an ideas standpoint end up ultimately failing as stories because the author's drive to include so many ideas seemingly leads to the eclipsing of the story itself. These books become less about a coherent place with a coherent story than an unsatisfactorily loose collection of ideas and impressions. I'm thinking here in particular of books like Scar Night (review here). The Quantum Thief does not suffer from this problem and instead expertly incorporates numerous novel ideas in such a way that the story is augmented rather than hampered.
This idea saturation alone would have probably made this a successful novel from a hard science fiction standpoint, but it is the fact that this aspect of the book is wedded to an extremely satisfying core adventure story that really makes it shine. This story is both rigorous but, like many heist stories, lighthearted for the most part at the same time.
The Quantum Thief is an extremely ambitious and nearly flawless work of hard science fiction that succeeds at operating on numerous levels. The book manages to be everything: a novel of ideas, a work of science fiction, an adventure story, a heist story, a comedy, and even a sort of future period piece. The author's writing is precise and achieves a synthesis that would have been unthinkable in less capable hands. I have no doubt that this will be the book of the year. Mr. Rajaniemi, please do quit your day job.
Rating: 10/10
The True First
The Quantum Thief was first published in the UK by Gollancz in 2010 in both a hardcover and softcover edition simultaneously. This first printing was limited to a mere 750 hardcover copies and 3,000 trade paperbacks. Needless to say, copies of the hardcover edition are very expensive to acquire. The book will be published in the United States by Tor in May of 2011.
[This review was based on a review copy]
7 comments:
Thanks for the review. I totally agree. Just curious- How do you come by the 1st edition, 1st printing info? I ordered a hardback from a UK store and it is a 1st edition. I feel pretty lucky now, seeing such a small printing.
@Jonathan: I'm glad someone else loves this book as much as I did!
The way I came by the information about how many copies of the first printing there were was by simply asking the publisher. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. For example, nobody at Night Shade Books ever responded to my inquiry about how many copies of the first printing of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl were printed...
The way you can tell if this particular book is a first printing is by the numberline on the copyright page; not the ISBN number, but rather the series of numbers in sequence. It should be a complete 1 through 10 series if it is a first printing.
Yeah, I knew that about the number line. I'm shocked at how small the printing was though. Lucky me. Thanks again.
I was shocked too!
Thank you for linking to the glossary. I was trying to keep it spoiler-free before the book's release in the US, but I see that I've failed... oh well.
The glossary is very helpful! And I think it's as spoiler-free as possible...even though it does have some. Thanks!
Thank you too. It was a pleasure creating that glossary, because the book is just so full of references. Rajaniemi likes Arsene Lupin and there are quite a few references, so I've also been busying myself with improving the Wikipedia coverage of the gentleman-thief.
Once the book is released in the US, I'll (or others may) expand the glossary to make it more helpful... which means spoilers galore!
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