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A review by guido_the_nature_guide
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
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.