The Quantum Thief

Written by Hannu Rajaniemi

Narrated by Scott Brick

The Quantum Thief is a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 Science Fiction & Fantasy title. One of Library Journal's Best SF/Fantasy Books of 2011

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits 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. Now he's confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.

Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turnedsingularity lights the night. What Mieli offers is the chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self-in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.

As Jean undertakes a series of capers on behalf of Mieli and her mysterious masters, elsewhere in the Oubliette investigator Isidore Beautrelet is called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, and finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur....

Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief is a crazy joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people communicating by sharing memories, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as MMORPG guild members. But for all its wonders, it is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge, and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: May 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781427214607

Hannu Rajaniemi

Born and raised in Finland, HANNU RAJANIEMI lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is a founding director of a financial consultancy, ThinkTank Maths. He is the holder of several advanced degrees in mathematics and physics. Multilingual from an early age, he writes his science fiction in English. He is the author of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel.

Reviews for The Quantum Thief

[hedrigall · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Really rewarding if you put in the mental effort to decipher the prose. So many ideas and bizarre terms are thrown at the reader, and it's sink or swim. The glossary on Wikipedia should help, though.There are some things I didn't get such as exactly who Le Roi was; I assume Jean is a gogol copy of him, or vice versa and what Pellegrine's ultimate motives are; at least the latter should be explained in forthcoming books.But damn, what a fantastic book full of mindboggling ideas. It's like (Revelation Space * Greg Egan)^China Miéville

[carlosemferreira · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Easy read, but utterly confusing. Too many neologisms for comfort. I guess a second read would help unlock much of the story's potential

[literate0ninja · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book. It was unique, creative, and expansive. The action scenes were well written, and the descriptions were so eloquent and immersive that I could almost taste the fabbed chocolate and smell the dust kicked up by the Quiet. I fully intend to read the second book, The Fractal Prince, if only to figure out a bit more of what was going on in the first book. That said... this book was really rather confusing. A lot of invented language (which I just sort of take as a given in Sci-Fi anymore) and a lot of puzzling physics and suspend-your-disbelief science (humans living on Mars have developed a privacy organ in their brains, really?). If you are not really paying attention, you can miss a lot of the little context clues that allow you to follow what the heck is going on. A lot of the motivations and histories of the characters are only hinted at in this work, which I'm hoping will be cleared up later in the series. I would recommend this book to people who like deep, thought-provoking works and aren't put off by having to re-read passages several times to get a handle on the content.

[hectigo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hannu Rajaniemi's debut is mind-blowing in its ideas and in the singular universe it creates. It might be the best exploration of posthumanity in fiction yet, and a terrific example of what sci-fi as a genre should represent. Of course, introducing a complex and completely new world in a mere three hundred pages is not an easy task, and Rajaniemi occasionally stumbles: reading the book sometimes feels like pretty hard work. Leaving explanations for later might make the story a tighter package, but also quite confusing at first. The convoluted plot doesn't help much. Still, the book is well worth a read for the concepts alone, and I suppose it might get better on a second reading. A real diamond in the rough if I've ever seen one, and I'd expect great things from Rajaniemi a bit further down the road.

[dadbrazelton · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is set in a future that has no connection to our lifestyle. Realistic? Probably, but very difficult to read and enjoy. I quit half way through. The front cover says it is his first Sci-fi novel. Science fiction connects to our lives. This book is therefore fantasy and I do not enjoy fantasy.

[debbiebspinner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant. I had to read this one in small bites, carefully, because so many concepts were dense and contextual. Very glad there's a sequel.

[chancemaree · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The first chapter was one of the best I've read in a long time. Initially, I found it a bit of a struggle to adapt to the concepts and visuals, but the challenge was worthwhile. I ignored the glossary and list of characters on Wikipedia because I trust a good show-don't-tell style of writing. At times I had to re-read sections that twisted and fried my mind, but I consider that fun, if and only if, the reward is gratifying. And it was.

The elements of the story include a dense and fine mix of current science jargon, sci-fi novel predecessors, good ole fashion prison breaks and thievery hijinks, flirty romance, clever retorts, and wildly imaginative landscapes out the wazoo--all well done!

However. I've withheld one star because I ended up feeling the ideas were too densely packed, in the same way a garden will choke with too many plants. Some elements could have been drawn out and savored. Instead, I found myself suffering a bit of whiplash as details and concepts ricocheted around my cranium. I prefer a high rate of concepts to dull reading any day, but the reading experience would have been improved with a bit more judicious shoveling of concept-thick jargon.

One of the more interesting aspects of the story was the immense power wielded by various opposing parties. Items such as form and identity were tools alongside nuclear bombs and spider ships. This was a war of gods dancing on the edge of mortality. Bodies are essentially prosthetics, privacy is treasured, and memories are shared or withheld like popcorn. A vaguely familiar sense of human values emerge in such a society, yet fears are fine tuned as death becomes transference to a machine-bodied servitude until the next resurrection. Truly a world of shifting streets and avenues, much like the mobile city on Mars itself. In summary, this is a fantastic read if you relax the need for firm ground and scramble to stay on the ride.

[jerhogan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Breakneck pace, with the opposite of infodump. Concepts are introduced to the story and either not explained or explained at the end. I stuck with it and enjoyed the ride but not sure about the integrity of the plot.

[jeremypreacher · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

You know, I like hard sci-fi much better when its obsessions are virtual worlds and their attendant social structures rather than rocketships and aliens. This is exactly that kind of sci-fi, and it makes me happy. If you like Charlie Stross's stuff, this will suit, I think.

[electricray · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When I've had too much coffee by brain starts spinning out and I can't get to sleep: thoughts belt around like I'm watching five films simultaneously, all on fast forward. Nothing stays in focus for long, but thoughts - some profound, some funny, some scary and some downright weird ricochet off each other like superheated pool balls - often, I've thought, illustrating Chomsky's famously unintelligible sentence "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". The wife calls it my buzzy brain phase. Why do I tell you this? Because reading The Quantum Thief is a bit like having buzzy brain, or at any rate being hotwired into someone else's, and listening to it through a blanket. Hannu Rajaniemi is fiercely intelligent (I read somewhere he's an actual quantum physicist) and he has some powerful ideas. But from the outset, you're expected already to be familiar with them (game theory and the prisoner's dilemma starts, without exposition, on page 1), and then to be nimble enough to follow Rajaniemi's fictional assemblages without any real help from the author. True, he's thereby refraining insulting his readers' intelligence, but at the same time parading his own, and I dare say it is only the most energetic, talented or disingenuous reader who claims to keep up. Many do. One thing to draw from these confections: this isn't hard sci-fi, no matter how many name-checks there may be to Robert Axelrod or nanotechnolegy. I suspect Rajuaniemi is throwing round concepts and hoping they stick, and readers are blustered into pretending they do. Personally I don't think hannu's impish ingenuity - and there is plenty of it, to be sure, is nearly enough to carry the day. I don't think he defies conventional narrative archetypes so much as is completely ignorant of them: Billy Sheehan once said, you have to know the rules before you can break 'em. This is a poorly plotted novel - there are far too many characters, significant ones are under-explained, and the characterisation is wafer thin across the board. Science Fiction can do one of two things: either present a plausible alternative universe based on credibly worked out science (or alternative science) - this is "hard sci fi"; a spod's paradise, but has at least the merit of theoretical integrity - or it can function as a metaphor for an exploration of recognisably human dilemmas (as, for example, Philip K Dick's extraordinary body of work did). Or, optimally, both. The Quantum Thief is neither: the "science" is way too airily thrown about (and under-explained) and the narrative is so confusing (and the baloney science too intrusive) for the story to have significant resonance as a morality tale. What's left - all that's left, I think - is a buzzy brain. Now my own buzzy brain is exasperating enough; having a ringside seat at someone else's is a mite more than this koala can bear.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The first pages of this novel read to me like another flashily written cyber-punkish novel--ho-hum. I actually put it aside but on the strength of several recommendations I picked it up again. I am glad I did, because it morphed into something wonderful, strange, and best of all, the first of a trilogy. There's a vision of a possible future, a consideration of the cost and price of power, and reflection on identity and self-image.

[felius_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Others have already written much better reviews, so I'll keep mine brief.I enjoyed this - it was great fun, with a frantic pace and some great characters. If you've not read much post-singularity hard-sf, then you may find yourself hitting a bit of a barrier with some of the terminology and concepts; the author just assumes you're familiar with the potential implications of ubiquitous nanotech, post-scarcity economies, quantum entanglement and the like and moves on from there.The (gushing) praise on the jacket from Charles Stross compares Rajaniemi's writing with Greg Egan, Ted Chiang and Alastair Reynolds. If you've read and enjoyed Alastair Reynolds then you'll love this - conversely, if you enjoy this and haven't read any Alastair Reynolds, you probably should. (Of course you should read Greg Egan and Ted Chiang too, but to me this felt much more like AR than either of those.)I look forward to the sequel, and other works exploring this universe.

[sunnysd_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Imprisoned thief Jean le Flambeur is broken out of a truly unique prison by Mieli and her amorphously mathematical spidership Perhonen. He's given a new task - steal himself... Sound convoluted? It should, because it is.Highly intellectual, beautifully written, intriguingly plotted - but I couldn't finish this one. Time, memory, mathematics, fractals, aliens, recycled memories, intrigue and societies based on incredibly structured, highly refined manners and mores, violence and regimentation, beauty and privacy... just didn't hook me, though.

[dukedom_enough · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jean is an exceptionally good thief. At the beginning of The Quantum Thief, he is rescued from a particularly nasty prison by someone who needs his skills. Isidore is an amateur detective, whom we meet as he solves a case. Of course, this novel will bring these two together, in a complex plot, made more complex by Jean’s partial amnesia.However, The Quantum Thief is not only a mystery, but science fiction, set in a post-Singularity solar system. Human minds run as software on artificial substrates, possibly as many simultaneous copies, wearing bodies varied in shape and capability. Minds far beyond human intelligence exist. Humanity has splintered into subcultures that might as well be different species; one subculture runs what amount to LAN parties as religious rituals. Jean’s prison is virtual, confronting many copies of himself and other prisoners with an endless round of prisoner’s dilemma games, which always eventually end in death for the losing copies. Minds enslaved to carry out work are called gogols, dead souls, whose plight is feared and, in some places, forbidden, so that other means to do the work must be found.The novel is a mystery, dense with clues, revelations and double-crosses, where what Jean’s rescuer wants him to steal is a larger mystery to them both than how; the story is largely Jean’s rediscovery of his earlier life. That life, and most of the plot, are set on an attractive, partly terraformed Mars, a relative backwater in the solar system, where gogol slavery has been replaced by periodic stretches of community service by minds who are free the rest of the time. Time away from such service is the Martian currency. Society is mediated by a software network called gevolut, which gives citizens fine, almost fractal control over who has access to information about themselves, in what contexts and for how long. Gevulot is like Facebook would be, had it been designed by some guardian angel of privacy, but universal and ubiquitous. It is this system that Isidore must negotiate, in his first chapters, in order to catch a - well, not killer, exactly, because the victim can be revived, after a fashion. The workings of Mars and gevulot were the most interesting parts of the book for me. Rajaniemi seems very up to date on speculations about mind uploading, online privacy, and the singularity.By contrast, he is weaker on physical science, with much of the exposition on such subjects feeling as though he were asking the reader “do you want quantum sauce on that?” Other flaws include using standard SF tropes without definition, e.g. “utility fog” - routine for me, but a reader unused to SF would find the going very rocky. I’m not sure all the many moving parts of the plot really fit together. Revelations about Rajaniemi’s solar system are held until late in the book, often for no real plot purpose, making reading the book harder than it needed to be.This is Rajaniemi’s first novel, and has received a great deal of hype. The Charles Stross blurbs on the cover compare him to Greg Egan, Alastair Reynolds and Ted Chiang. I disagree in the Egan case - he’s not that interesting on physics and philosophy, Egan’s specialties, and I also disagree in the Chiang case - he’s not nearly Chiang’s equal as a writer. Reynolds - perhaps; I haven’t read that much Reynolds. Most mysteries are not to my taste, and I found the book overly busy. Rananiemi comes up with a great many clever ideas, many more than I’ve noted here, but except for the intriguing gevulot material, these ideas felt to me as though nothing but cleverness was really at stake - unlike Stross or Bruce Sterling, for example, where cleverness serves an original, interesting take on the world. The book’s story has a real ending, but with a coda promising further adventures, so perhaps the second and third books of the promised trilogy will take us further into the more cosmopolitan parts of the author’s solar system, and fulfill the great promise of this fine debut.

[thedivineoomba · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fun who done it set on a future mars that I almost understood, but didn't quite. By that, I mean you got thrown into this world, without much of an explanation. So the technology is so far advanced, I didn't quite grasp it. But, the characters were entirely human, if augmented a bit. Here, we have a hot shot thief in prison who unexpectedly gets freed by someone who needs his skills. What she needs him to do is not entirely explained, because before the thief can help, he needs to regain his memories that he hid to keep safe. Then, there is the detective, the only person in this world with the skills necessary to solve a series of crimes, stealing someone's gogol, or soul. Leaving the body lifeless an unresurectable. The two plots intertwine on Mars, in an odd moving city where people are determined to be private, and a simple newspaper article can be illegal.The story moved quickly, the plot was well designed and the characters very likeable.Very good first story. I can't wait to read the next in this series.

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 out, who the major players are and why they're doing what they're doing. I'm not really attached to the main characters. I do want to know if Mieli gets what she's doing this for, though.

[drakhir · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The thief and his escape were a brilliant start. I was just beginning to become really engaged with the story when we switch perspectives to the 'detective'.

I could not care less for the story. Perhaps it was that this was an intro piece, only setting the scene and having nothing to do with the rest of the story. Now you can see how brilliant he is.

But i suspect not. This is two stories, and the weight of one pulls the other from the sky. I stopped reading on page 57, when i entered yet another story. This one might only be a couple of pages, but it got me to check through, and i see more paper is covered by the detective, so no thanks.

Shame.

[Jon Hulburt · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to get it but I struggled to latch on to character ls which made me not care about them very much. Interesting ideas though and cool world building.

[tadad_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For all that it is shelved as science fiction, this seemed more like a mystery to me. A mystery set in the far future in a society…or, rather, three societies…that are quite imaginative and intriguing, but a mystery nonetheless. Given that a Google of Rajaniemi shows him to possess of doctorate in mathematical physics, the story is relatively undemanding in terms of hard science. Most of it is simply hand-waving at some concepts and new terms. This may be a positive or negative depending upon your tastes: if you want to know how privacy management can make one individual invisible to another, you're out of luck. If you just want to enjoy the social implications without laboring through a lot of "stuff", you're good to go.However, I can see how other commenters were overwhelmed by the neologisms and half-explained social concepts; the book is chock-a-block with them. For me, that was part of what made it interesting. It's a book that makes you work. Until the explanations come, you have to pay attention and think about what you're reading. The experience is very immersive. That said, I think Rajaniemi did go a bit overboard and made the reader work a little too hard. The story would not have been harmed by a couple of clues as to what the heck was going on in the background so that there were a few less moments of, "Oh, that's what he meant!" after the fact. Keeping the details of the central mystery close to the vest does not require keeping the details of the entire universe there.The plot moves at a decent clip and the central mystery is certainly no worse than many I've seen that were explicitly in that genre. The characters range from interesting to bizarre, but they certainly grab your attention.All in all, as a first novel, it shows a lot of promise. I'll pick up his next one to see where he's going to go with his writing.

[reading_fox · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is not a novel that will please everyone. I found it fun, although possibly tries to be a bit too clever, and I'm not sure the conclusion is quite supported by the preceding work. But I did enjoy it nethertheless. There has been a few charismatic thief based fantasy novels in the last year or two, but this is the first I've come across in an SF setting. As with many SF novels the backstory isn't explained and you're left to try an piece it together from the fragments referred to too infrequently. The basics seem to be that a paradigm sift happened on Earth allowing conciousness uploading to a major new technologies, but only some people had control over it, and there were divisions in the ranks. The story starts with our hero -one Jean Flambeau incarerated in a distant prision playing Prisoner's Dilemma for real over and over again. Then, just as he's about to lose for the last time he is rescued by someone who needs his specific thief skills for a quest that is never specified. First he has to regain his thieving skills by finding where he hid them. Or maybe where a copy of him might have hidden them - digitial personalities being what they are. This is likely to have been on Mars where there is a privacy obscessed society that mediates every personal interaction through a nanotech AI, allowing you to forget you've ever seen someone if both parties agree, or just prevent yourself from being seen to start with. Here we meet the other key character one Isodore, a member of this society and also somewhat of a detective, investigating anomolies in the exomemory. The game is afoot.The focus switches between three main characters- Jean, Meili his rescuer and isodore. However only Jean is a first person voice, both Isodore and Meili take thrid person, which makes the switches very obvious to identify, if occasionally a little bit stilted. On hte whole I prefered this technique over other multiple POV novels which generally irritate me with unclear character jumps. Much of the plot remains deliberately opaque with quantum level re-writing ofthe past histories and memories possible, and then merged into multiple copies of a character. The Author does a very good job of keeping this clear! and you always know which characters are involved. The world building is very clever, and well used - a lot of thorugh has gone into te details of what has happened in the past and how that's effected what is experienced - even if the actual science is left unexplained. But you have to pay attaention and have some degree of understanding about cryptology and standard SF tropes at the very least.I'm very interested to see where the sequel takes us.

[pjc57_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Once you get your head around the opening few chapters and the complicated science fiction concepts (for a non-science fiction fanatic)this settles into being a fast moving story with enough twists and turns to keep you wanting to read more. Enjoyed it.

[nnschiller · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really impressive merging of a story of a thief and his relationships with an amazing world informed by the mergings of bits and atoms, the physical and the digital.

This book is hard sci-fi that is more about data than rockets and with a warm beating heart.

[romis78 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Maybe I'm too technophobic, but I found this quite confusing. It took quite a while to get in to the characters and even longer to sort them out, and the action was meager. On the plus side, it was interesting enough that I read it quite quickly, so there must be something there.

[alanpoulter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel starts off at a feverish pace and never lets up. There are two main threads. One centres on Jean le Flambeur, a thief, who, at the start of the novel is incarcerated in a 'Dilemma Prison', an instantiation of the mathematical model of the Prisoners Dilemma', in which separated criminals must guess what the other is going to do, to try to get the best outcome for themselves. Jean is not doing well at this game but he is sprung from the prison by by Mieli, a warrior, and her sentient ship, Perhonen. She takes him to Mars and the Oubliette, a moving city that he used to live in. In return for his freedom he must recover a set of memories he secretly stashed there before being arrested as they are of interest to Mieli's employer, the Pelligrini.In the Oubliette, Isidore Beautrelet, an architecture student, is building a reputation as a dectective. A chocolatier is murdered and Isidore unpicks what appears to be a straightforward case into something more complex and sinister. 'The Gentleman', a kind of policemen, introduces Isidore to the 'millenniaire' Christian Unruh, who has had an unpleasant experience while reading in his private library. Time spent alive is currency and even though he is time-rich, Christian must return to the Slow (a kind of community service). He is holding a party to mark this transition and he is upset that someone called 'Jean le Flambeur' has left a note in his library to say that he would be attending this party...The above is just the bare bones of the plot. Also left out are explanations (or sometimes just guesses about) the blizzard of characters, cliques, places, devices and technologies that this novel mints names for and relentlessly throws at the reader. I tried hard to pay attention and keep up but had to 'go with the flow' in parts. I hope the next novel is slower paced and makes more use of the usually evil practice of 'info-dumping'. For all its obscurities and frenetic plot, as a first novel this is a cracking start.

[katong_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Marvelously inventive, a wicked fun ride.