336 pages
Published May 22, 2010 by Gollancz.
Jean le Flambeur gets up in the morning and has to kill himself before his other self can kill him first. Just another day in the Dilemma Prison. Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is a currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turned-singularity lights the night. Meanwhile, investigator Isidore Beautrelet, called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur...
Indeed, in his many lives, the entity called Jean le Flambeur has been a thief, a confidence artist, a posthuman mind-burgler, and more. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his deeds are known throughout the Heterarchy, from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. In his last exploit, he …
Jean le Flambeur gets up in the morning and has to kill himself before his other self can kill him first. Just another day in the Dilemma Prison. Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is a currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turned-singularity lights the night. Meanwhile, investigator Isidore Beautrelet, called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur...
Indeed, in his many lives, the entity called Jean le Flambeur has been a thief, a confidence artist, a posthuman mind-burgler, and more. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his deeds are known throughout the Heterarchy, from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. In his last exploit, he managed the supreme feat of hiding the truth about himself from the one person in the solar system hardest to hide from: himself. Now he has the chance to regain himself in all his power—in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.
The Quantum Thief is a breathtaking joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people who communicate via shared memory, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as an MMORPG guild. But for all its wonders, The Quantum Thief is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, jealousy, and revenge.
This book has everything you could possibly want: Incredible world building, lovable characters, funny writing and an engrossing plot. If you like SciFi, you will like this.
Oh, this book was frustrating.
It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.
So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF …
Oh, this book was frustrating.
It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.
So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF does a "smart wheel" do, Mr. Rajaniemi?), but the layering and interweaving of the plot itself. And I enjoyed the appreciation of craft, be it the thief's, the detective's, the watchmaker's, and so on.
But in the end the plot felt like a con at the reader's expense, and all the other characters just felt like foils for the insufferably smug thief, and random violence just happened to rip the sexy warrior lady's toga at least one time too many, and there are so many better books out there.
Oh, this book was frustrating.
It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.
So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF …
Oh, this book was frustrating.
It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.
So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF does a "smart wheel" do, Mr. Rajaniemi?), but the layering and interweaving of the plot itself. And I enjoyed the appreciation of craft, be it the thief's, the detective's, the watchmaker's, and so on.
But in the end the plot felt like a con at the reader's expense, and all the other characters just felt like foils for the insufferably smug thief, and random violence just happened to rip the sexy warrior lady's toga at least one time too many, and there are so many better books out there.
