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A review by gluckenstein
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
3.75
“He gives it a single-mindedness he found in an Oortian sculptor, and the coordination ability of a concert pianist, seasoned with more primitive animal forms from the older libraries: shark and feline”
Overall pretty impressive.
Gives out the vibes of a mix of old and new space opera (Alfred Bester and Ian M. Banks) and a curious smidge of Pitoff's Vidocq.
In the days when I've only just acquired the ability to read science fiction in English without looking up words in the dictionary twice a sentence, I was extremely scared by books like this (including this one specifically): what I then understood as HARD (otherwise why so many references to quantum entanglements) sci fi set in ridiculously involved transhuman futures. With a sigh of relief or shake of the head, but I find I no longer fear those. Have learnt to see through the jargon recognizing bigger things like tropes and structure.
This book is a little too puzzle-box-y for my liking (amnesiac hero with a dark past, falsified history, and other mysteries stacked upon mysteries) but comes together in the last third in a pretty satisfying and action-packed manner. Don't expect too much from characters, but as far as stories about mismatched pairings a la 48 Hrs go, this one, with its titular thief and a winged gal who extracts him from prison, is broadly functional, and that's not counting that the thief has a complex melodramatic backstory of his own to recover and sort out, and the setting feels pretty bonkers and large-scale.
That said, bonkers can go two ways, and if most of the time it means imaginative, like a moving city that rearranges itself, other times it can mean just some overcomplicated bullshit imagery that does not compute like aforequoted feline shark with the coordination ability of a concert pianist.
Overall pretty impressive.
Gives out the vibes of a mix of old and new space opera (Alfred Bester and Ian M. Banks) and a curious smidge of Pitoff's Vidocq.
In the days when I've only just acquired the ability to read science fiction in English without looking up words in the dictionary twice a sentence, I was extremely scared by books like this (including this one specifically): what I then understood as HARD (otherwise why so many references to quantum entanglements) sci fi set in ridiculously involved transhuman futures. With a sigh of relief or shake of the head, but I find I no longer fear those. Have learnt to see through the jargon recognizing bigger things like tropes and structure.
This book is a little too puzzle-box-y for my liking (amnesiac hero with a dark past, falsified history, and other mysteries stacked upon mysteries) but comes together in the last third in a pretty satisfying and action-packed manner. Don't expect too much from characters, but as far as stories about mismatched pairings a la 48 Hrs go, this one, with its titular thief and a winged gal who extracts him from prison, is broadly functional, and that's not counting that the thief has a complex melodramatic backstory of his own to recover and sort out, and the setting feels pretty bonkers and large-scale.
That said, bonkers can go two ways, and if most of the time it means imaginative, like a moving city that rearranges itself, other times it can mean just some overcomplicated bullshit imagery that does not compute like aforequoted feline shark with the coordination ability of a concert pianist.