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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
An engaging universe with enough mind twists to keep the story interesting despite the typical male/female character roles.
Audiobook read by Scott Brick. I wish he'd done more to distinguish between the female characters and some of his pacing decisions seemed a little weird, but it was mostly fine.
I am probably going to have to reread this at least once to feel like I've gotten the story.
The thing I'm happiest about is the prevalence of female characters. They have their own agendas and skill sets and perspectives...although, as usual, men rule while women run things. Still, there's no assumption that soldiers, superheroes, programmers, starships or deities are gendered male and there's no patronizing surprise when they're women. That's completely refreshing.
I am probably going to have to reread this at least once to feel like I've gotten the story.
The thing I'm happiest about is the prevalence of female characters. They have their own agendas and skill sets and perspectives...although, as usual, men rule while women run things. Still, there's no assumption that soldiers, superheroes, programmers, starships or deities are gendered male and there's no patronizing surprise when they're women. That's completely refreshing.
This was brilliant.
It was also very hard to follow. Like, at times, seemingly impossible.
It's great though. You just have to roll with it for a while to let the book explain things to you and hope that things will make sense soon. Not all of them will, but you'll start to understand what you need to understand.
This is a fascinating book, and it's a really neat crime thriller set in a world that is very, very advanced. It has both the mystery of "How will the detective solve this crime?" and "How will the thief pull off this crime?" at the same time while following both the Detective and the Thief, and keeping you just ahead enough of the story to be aware of what is happening.
I was able to get ahead of the story a bit and figured out something that was later revealed and made me think "Well... yeah. That's been clear for a while right?" and maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. The story had become very convoluted by that point.
This book has some really interesting ideas when it comes to what society may be like if people get to a point where there are disposable bodies and the ability to move your mind from one body to another. And it looks at it on a grand scale all at once rather than a single individual, it shows a whole universe and how it shapes lives if you constantly have access to devices that can shape reality around you.
This is just impossible to describe. There's some great stuff in this, but it's not for everyone. It's a really confusing story for a lot of the book. But if you stick with it, it's well worth it. Very good and I want to see where it goes so that maybe I can understand what happened at all in this book that I read.
It was also very hard to follow. Like, at times, seemingly impossible.
It's great though. You just have to roll with it for a while to let the book explain things to you and hope that things will make sense soon. Not all of them will, but you'll start to understand what you need to understand.
This is a fascinating book, and it's a really neat crime thriller set in a world that is very, very advanced. It has both the mystery of "How will the detective solve this crime?" and "How will the thief pull off this crime?" at the same time while following both the Detective and the Thief, and keeping you just ahead enough of the story to be aware of what is happening.
I was able to get ahead of the story a bit and figured out something that was later revealed and made me think "Well... yeah. That's been clear for a while right?" and maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. The story had become very convoluted by that point.
This book has some really interesting ideas when it comes to what society may be like if people get to a point where there are disposable bodies and the ability to move your mind from one body to another. And it looks at it on a grand scale all at once rather than a single individual, it shows a whole universe and how it shapes lives if you constantly have access to devices that can shape reality around you.
This is just impossible to describe. There's some great stuff in this, but it's not for everyone. It's a really confusing story for a lot of the book. But if you stick with it, it's well worth it. Very good and I want to see where it goes so that maybe I can understand what happened at all in this book that I read.
challenging
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I just finished re-reading this, after having first read it way back in 2014. It's excellent. This is is one of those hard SF novels chock-full of big ideas, but not at the cost the story and characters, which are still compelling. If you enjoy hard SF, mysteries, posthumanism, and cyber-punk, you're likely to enjoy The Quantum Theif.
I should warn you that reading The Quantum Thief takes patience. It's filled with terms of art borrowed from literature and religious traditions. I had to look up terms like Gogol (an oblique reference to a 19th-century Russian novel), Tzadik (a Hebrew word for "righteous one"), and Sobornost (another term from Russian literature meaning "a spiritual community of many jointly living people"). A lot of these terms are eventually explained, but don't hold your breath while waiting for those explanations. They sometimes come 100 pages after a term is introduced. I vacillated between being tickled and exasperated.
I should warn you that reading The Quantum Thief takes patience. It's filled with terms of art borrowed from literature and religious traditions. I had to look up terms like Gogol (an oblique reference to a 19th-century Russian novel), Tzadik (a Hebrew word for "righteous one"), and Sobornost (another term from Russian literature meaning "a spiritual community of many jointly living people"). A lot of these terms are eventually explained, but don't hold your breath while waiting for those explanations. They sometimes come 100 pages after a term is introduced. I vacillated between being tickled and exasperated.
This is the first time that I've ever seen a reference to the research work I did at Emory in a work of fiction. (The thief uses EPR states to transfer information store in the quantum spider to communicate with Perhonen.) For which I'd have to give it a solid 'meh'.
The main problem with this book is that if a book is a promise, then the author overpromised and underdelivered. You can't just dazzle us with brilliant ideas, you have to insinuate them into us, via our connection to your prose. I did love the idea of the gevulot. I think the exploration of a world with this facet would have made an interesting novel in itself. I felt this and many other concepts were underdeveloped, as if the author said, if I just skim this idea I can add a bunch of other cool stuff, too. I found I never really connected with the characters, so all there untied loose ends didn't end up bothering me.
Big ideas, good prose, poor characterization, unrealized story potential.
The main problem with this book is that if a book is a promise, then the author overpromised and underdelivered. You can't just dazzle us with brilliant ideas, you have to insinuate them into us, via our connection to your prose. I did love the idea of the gevulot. I think the exploration of a world with this facet would have made an interesting novel in itself. I felt this and many other concepts were underdeveloped, as if the author said, if I just skim this idea I can add a bunch of other cool stuff, too. I found I never really connected with the characters, so all there untied loose ends didn't end up bothering me.
Big ideas, good prose, poor characterization, unrealized story potential.
adventurous
challenging
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Stellar, smashing, wildly inventive. Push through the uncertainty and complexity and you'll have an amazing time with this book.
The heir of the cyberpunk throne and extremely well suited to the crown.
The heir of the cyberpunk throne and extremely well suited to the crown.
Decent. Packed with cool ideas, and the crime-caper/detective-story aspects were fun; but, as every other review will tell you, it's an extreme example of "show, don't tell." As a result, you spend most of the book trying to figure out who the different factions are, and what the heck the ubiquitous, hyper-futuristic, quantum/networked technologies are supposed to be doing. Wasn't fantastic as commute "escape listening," but might have been pretty awesome in a different format or context.
This was quite good, especially for a debut novel. It demonstrated original world building. Although the characters started out as fairly uninteresting, they truly started to grow in the latter half of the book. I will continue this series..