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guido_the_nature_guide's review against another edition
4.0
After the first two chapters, I said to myself, "Whoa, what the hell is going on here?" This novel/world is utterly disorienting yet totally compelling. There is no gentle introducion or acclimation - the reader is immediately dropped in the deep end. Gradual explication follows in subsequent chapters, but never enough to make Oubliette merely exotic. Obliette is a city on Mars that slowly walks across the desert, where currency is time, and where once a person's time is spent (literally, like paying cab fare and buying lattes) they become a "Quiet", a worker drone in service to the city, often a mind inhabiting a machine, until they can be "reborn". In Oubliette a rich person, someone who has amassed great quantities of time, not cash, is called a "millenniaire". In Oubliette privacy is protected by a person's "gevulot", a field that the owner opens or closes to allow such interpersonal contact as desired. [Think of those smudged faces in news footage.] Information, even social invitations, are exchanged by "shared memories". On top of this are layer after layer after layer of politics, plots, subplots, counterplots, misdirection and obfuscation.
On an elementary level, this is the story of a master thief who returns to Oubliette to recover something of incredible value, and of a detective in pursuit. There is much more, including murder, love, skullduggery, and machinations aplenty. Nothing is as it seems. Reality is fluid. To me there is a strong Kantian (or Leibnitzian) flavor to the "reality" depicted here, philosophical idealism taken to a modern digital extreme, combined with the weirdness of quantum physics. Perceptions may be only memories stored in quantum computers and subject to manipulation; there are no noumena.
After the final chapter, I said to myself, "whoa, what the hell went on here?" Even though I consider myself reasonably literate and intelligent, I probably understood only about 80% of this book, but I loved it. I gave it four stars rather than five only because it sets itself up for Book Two. I am not a fan of sequels, even though I will most certainly read this one.
On an elementary level, this is the story of a master thief who returns to Oubliette to recover something of incredible value, and of a detective in pursuit. There is much more, including murder, love, skullduggery, and machinations aplenty. Nothing is as it seems. Reality is fluid. To me there is a strong Kantian (or Leibnitzian) flavor to the "reality" depicted here, philosophical idealism taken to a modern digital extreme, combined with the weirdness of quantum physics. Perceptions may be only memories stored in quantum computers and subject to manipulation; there are no noumena.
After the final chapter, I said to myself, "whoa, what the hell went on here?" Even though I consider myself reasonably literate and intelligent, I probably understood only about 80% of this book, but I loved it. I gave it four stars rather than five only because it sets itself up for Book Two. I am not a fan of sequels, even though I will most certainly read this one.
nikolai_k's review against another edition
4.0
Half the time I had only the vaguest of ideas about what was going on but it tickled my oubliette.
lesserjoke's review against another edition
2.0
I sympathize with speculative fiction writers who don’t want to explain things about their universe that would be obvious to its characters, but there still need to be some clues for readers to pick up on. The Quantum Thief throws you right into the deep end, with many basic elements of its story not making sense until roughly halfway through the text and others still unclear at its end. There are elements of this novel that are neat, but as a whole it’s a jumbled mess that simply doesn’t cohere.
sunscour's review against another edition
4.0
This was an excellent hard science fiction story. I loved the mystery and the science. Thinking and memories, weird stuff.
liinukka's review against another edition
3.0
This isn't a very long book but pretty dense. Plot-wise, it actually seems pretty straight forward, but you really have to parse through all the language and world building in order to figure out what's going on. It's a world where things have advanced so much that it's hard to wrap your head around the concepts. But the ideas are very interesting, if somewhat confusing/mind-boggling.
infyria's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
How did everyone manage to be interesting, except the main character?
shoba's review against another edition
4.0
“We play the same game over and over again, in different forms. An archetypal game beloved by economists and mathematicians. Sometimes it’s chicken: we are racers on an endless highway, driving at each other at high speeds, deciding whether or not to turn away at the last minute. Sometimes we are soldiers trapped in trench warfare, facing each other across no-man’s-land. And sometimes they go back to basics and make us prisoners – old-fashioned prisoners, questioned by hard-eyed men – who have to choose between betrayal and the code of silence. Guns are the flavour of today. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.”
A thief in a dilemma prison picks up a gun and shots a copy of himself. A winged rescuer frees a single copy of the thief to perform a task for her employer. The thief and his rescuer travel to Mars, a planet where time is currency and memories are stolen for profit. On Mars they will try to locate the thief’s memories, the ones he hid from himself.
Are memories the source of one’s identity? Was the past real? But if fabricated, how does that change one’s identity and ability to make choices?
A story about time, memory, identity, free will, and quantum entanglements.
stojg's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
monzillareads's review against another edition
3.0
Excellent ideas with a surprising lack of world building. The narrative was weak and the characters uninteresting.