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fairymodmother 's review for:
The Quantum Thief
by Hannu Rajaniemi
So, I thought this was pretty fun. High octane, manly, philosophical in the extreme but also...fun. It wasn't trying to be more, it wasn't preaching at me, and it didn't quite go so far as to see all women as blow up dolls that pushed back. They did have their own agendas, even if part of that invariably included sex with the MC.
CONTENT WARNING:
Things to love:
-Mystery heist explosion! Prison breaks! Mystery solving! Serial kleptomania! Cabals! Heists! All in one orgiastic whodunnit!
-Worldbuilding. This is so funky. It reminds me of many things, with groups colonizing different places and imbuing it with the social ideals of the colonizers. Mars has 2 quirks: privacy is paramount, and the cities move at random so that attackers can't predict where the city will be at any given time. There are games-crazy folk who theory craft their physical construction for min-max capabilities. There are cults who worship game devs. Essentially, this universe is built on the theory that all of us are simulations, and then expands that to extremes, and I think that was extremely well done.
-Broken boy. We've got a thief who's literally lost his mind and is also literally dominated by a war priestess. I mean. Am I meant to be immune to that?
-Just the right pace. Super impressed as the author is Finnish and this is in English. There's no fat here. It's fast without intrusive writing gimmicks. Is EVERYTHING spelled out for me? No, I still don't understand many things. But I understood everything I needed to make this particular drama dramatic without cringing at info dumps, rants, or leaps of faith.
Things I didn't love:
-Boys will be boys. This was still for boys. Where the dick went was terribly important in this book, and was only omitted when someone yanked our hound dog's leash. At certain points, to reference Family Guy, le Flambeur did conduct with his penis.
-A lot I don't understand. There are cultures here with orders of magnitude more post-human ability than others. I don't follow the power spike and how it works for this society.
I'm gonna read on, so it's definitely less obnoxious than many I've read with these literary motifs, but I would not encourage to read this with much in the way of expectation other than "a fun ride," double entendre intended.
CONTENT WARNING:
Spoiler
patricide, slavery, coercion of will, use of someone else's body for sex, gore, religion.Things to love:
-Mystery heist explosion! Prison breaks! Mystery solving! Serial kleptomania! Cabals! Heists! All in one orgiastic whodunnit!
-Worldbuilding. This is so funky. It reminds me of many things, with groups colonizing different places and imbuing it with the social ideals of the colonizers. Mars has 2 quirks: privacy is paramount, and the cities move at random so that attackers can't predict where the city will be at any given time. There are games-crazy folk who theory craft their physical construction for min-max capabilities. There are cults who worship game devs. Essentially, this universe is built on the theory that all of us are simulations, and then expands that to extremes, and I think that was extremely well done.
-Broken boy. We've got a thief who's literally lost his mind and is also literally dominated by a war priestess. I mean. Am I meant to be immune to that?
-Just the right pace. Super impressed as the author is Finnish and this is in English. There's no fat here. It's fast without intrusive writing gimmicks. Is EVERYTHING spelled out for me? No, I still don't understand many things. But I understood everything I needed to make this particular drama dramatic without cringing at info dumps, rants, or leaps of faith.
Things I didn't love:
-Boys will be boys. This was still for boys. Where the dick went was terribly important in this book, and was only omitted when someone yanked our hound dog's leash. At certain points, to reference Family Guy, le Flambeur did conduct with his penis.
-A lot I don't understand. There are cultures here with orders of magnitude more post-human ability than others. I don't follow the power spike and how it works for this society.
I'm gonna read on, so it's definitely less obnoxious than many I've read with these literary motifs, but I would not encourage to read this with much in the way of expectation other than "a fun ride," double entendre intended.