The Quantum Thief

by Hannu Rajaniemi

336 pages

Published May 22, 2010 by Gollancz.

ISBN:: 978-0-575-08887-0

(71 reviews)

Jean le Flambeur gets up in the morning and has to kill himself before his other self can kill him first. Just another day in the Dilemma Prison. Rescued by the mysterious Mieli and her flirtatious spacecraft, Jean is taken to the Oubliette, the Moving City of Mars, where time is a currency, memories are treasures, and a moon-turned-singularity lights the night. Meanwhile, investigator Isidore Beautrelet, called in to investigate the murder of a chocolatier, finds himself on the trail of an arch-criminal, a man named le Flambeur...

Indeed, in his many lives, the entity called Jean le Flambeur has been a thief, a confidence artist, a posthuman mind-burgler, and more. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his deeds are known throughout the Heterarchy, from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. In his last exploit, he managed the supreme feat of hiding the truth about himself from the one person in the solar system hardest to hide from: himself. Now he has the chance to regain himself in all his power—in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed.

The Quantum Thief is a breathtaking joyride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people who communicate via shared memory, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as an MMORPG guild. But for all its wonders, The Quantum Thief is also a story powered by very human motives of betrayal, jealousy, and revenge.

2 editions

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'LibraryThing'

2 stars

Oh, this book was frustrating.

It's in a sub-genre of scifi that I don't get on very well with in the first place: that sort of in-between "hard" and "soft" that tries to blind the reader with buzzwords and technology but hasn't done the work that goes into hard scifi of actually figuring out what all these things will actually be and how they'll work. I almost dropped it after the first few chapters, between fatigue at "smart" this and "q-" that, and a deep discomfort at the ways it uses Jewish culture. In the author's defence it came out well before the last few years' surge of anti-semitism, but at best the use of "gevulot" and "tzaddikim" feels appropriative, and reading it this winter it just felt creepy.

So why did I keep reading? I did enjoy the wild inventiveness of the book. Not the casually name-dropped technology (WTF does a "smart wheel" do, Mr. Rajaniemi?), but the layering and interweaving of the plot itself. And I enjoyed the appreciation of craft, be it the thief's, the detective's, the watchmaker's, and so on.

But in the end the plot felt like a con at the reader's expense, and all the other characters just felt like foils for the insufferably smug thief, and random violence just happened to rip the sexy warrior lady's toga at least one time too many, and there are so many better books out there.

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'LibraryThing'

2 stars

cargide reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Como buen libro de ciencia ficción tirando a dura, está complicado cogerle el hilo de primeras: demasiadas razas, tecnologías y términos en general que no terminan de explicar del todo.
Conforme avanza la historia, te empiezas a dar cuenta de que da un poco igual, todo está tan bien hilado que a la segunda o tercera vez que mencionan el término, ya lo has entendido.

La historia tiene la base de las novelas de robos, con su detective y su ladrón cruzándose por la ciudad, sus conspiraciones y sus secretos que se van desvelando poco a poco. Lo típico, vamos. Lo bueno del giro SciFi del libro, es que las conclusiones te pillan aún más de sorpresa, pero siguen teniendo sentido con todo lo que te han mostrado antes.

Muy recomendable, y buscaré la secuela a ver que tal.

Lord of Candy reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

What do you get when you cross an epic space opera, high end maths, realities, Sherlock Holmes, game theory, Inception, and a bunch of other viral memes? The Quantum Thief.

This was recommended to me after [b:Ninefox Gambit|26118426|Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)|Yoon Ha Lee|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1446557461s/26118426.jpg|46065520]. A comparative study in far-flung futures with concepts one can barely comprehend. Thanks Brad! I enjoyed this.

In Ninefox you have an unforgiving author who does not care if you know what he's talking about. Sink or swim, and you drown for a while before thinking you understand the meta. Even then, you may not know the meta. C'est la vie. It's a fun ride, regardless.

The Quantum Thief, however, has a more traditional approach. Yes, there is a lot of technology and far far out there notions but they have a certain descriptor or meta tags within the work that allow anyone with some technophysicsacuity to grapple. I'm not saying I got it all, but my little Sapien brain found more toeholds than not.

Alright alright, that's all structural stuff. This is a fun story with a lot of good references embedded in the work. If you want a good mystery, some good twists, some pretty rich characters that while not fully fleshed out here have tendrils towards potential completions later on, you should enjoy this.

This story is partially episodal; you have a pretty well-defined beginning and end of a piece of a puzzle. A teaser for the larger arc manifests only at the beginning and the end. Meaning you can leave it for a while or continue on--I think I'll continue on.

Daniel Darabos reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I read it right after [book:Leviathan Wakes|8855321]. Well it's also a non-magical sci-fi. No faster-than-light travel, no anti-gravity, no aliens. It's also set in the Solar System. But it's totally full of magic anyway, and just the opposite of the gritty world of Leviathan Wakes. Imagine if you took all the reasonably imaginable technologies to their extreme. Nuclear fusion? One of the main characters has a fusion reactor in their leg. Space ships? One of the main characters is a space ship. Digital consciousness? Nanotechnology? There is a human mind encoded in the crystal structure of a chocolate dress.

In the first half it feels like every sentence introduces on average two far-future technologies. It's an amazing wild ride. It's not fair commenting on what is and is not realistic here, because it's all way beyond current engineering possibilities. But with a lot of the technologies it feels there is …

“The Highway, twenty lightseconds away, their next way-point. A constant torrent of ships, one of the few rare ideal invariant surfaces in the N-body Newton’s nightmare of the Solar System, a gravitational artery that lets you travel fast and easy with the gentlest of pushes. A safe haven, too far away.”

I found two exceptions to this, the pervasive “q-dots”, which are magical force-fields, and “entanglement”, which seems to entangle minds, not quantum states. I can live with that.

And from the technical wonders, a very imaginative world is built. Nothing is as you would expect. Most of the story takes place in one of the walking cities on Mars. Pirates try to steal a copy of the mind of a chocolatier. It is all so romantic, like the romantic sci-fi of the 19th century, but built on more up-to-date foundation.

There is a lot of food for thought among the wild imagination and reckless action. A lot of sci-fi when they talk about technologies, like uploaded minds, they think in terms of "what would people living today think about it?" ([book:Pandora's Star|45252] is a good example. "Uploaded minds would probably fly off to a planet somewhere and do nothing.") But The Quantum Thief knows people would think whatever the programmer of the system executing their consciousness wanted them to think. Nothing would be the same. We would not have the same concerns anymore. The definition of "we" would no longer hold. In The Quantum Thief a hero catches a bullet with a human consciousness inside, and interrogates it after the skirmish!

The second half of the book builds some good mysteries, characters, and plots out of these brilliant elements. Then the story flies off toward a brand new world, promising more of the novelty and excitement for the rest of the trilogy. I'll continue to the next book!

UPDATE: I read the whole trilogy and it's awesome all the way. A non-stop stream of technologies taken to the extreme, poetry, and thought-provoking dilemmas take you through a twisting plot.

Kibrika reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I love uploaded and AI stories. This one a bit more adventure than not.

neilernst reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Quite enteraining and novel world-setting. The "no infodump" approach was initially hard to follow but explanations of what the background was came frequently enough to answer my questions.

Some of these type of books - like the Culture series - suffer from deus ex machina syndrome: one character is so crazily equipped with magical devices that resolution to the story depends on a fantastic escape using far-fetched tech. "Oh look: wings that come out of your body".

Here, though, the author's approach is more one of highly advanced technology that is very unevenly distributed, so one does not know who might possess what. And the mechanics of block-chains and public key encryption were intriguing.

TimmyMac reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I really enjoyed this book, even though I'm not 100% sure what I just read. The language is tricky, and the underlying conceit is complicated, but the language is beautiful and I can't wait to read the next one. I honestly may read this one again first, though.

David C reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'LibraryThing'

4 stars

To be consistent with other rankings this should be a 5/5.

I have just re-read this book, having mostly forgotten what it is about, and really really enjoyed it.

At the science level, humanity is still confined to the solar system (if one calls the Oort cloud part of the solar system). Some humans are wildly augmented, but most are still DNA based biological forms as nearly as I can tell. Most of the story takes place on Mars. The book is heavy on mathematics and physics: prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, and cryptography all add to the plot.

At the political level, there are multiple factions, one of which may or may not be responsible for the disappearance of Jupiter. Mars is a reasonably closed world, unwelcoming to foreigners, although there is a colony of zoku, political refugees from inter-planetary war, descended from a colony of gamers.

At the personal level, Mieli is a native of Oort, extorted into rescuing Jean le Flambeur from prison. Jean himself is a legendary thief and once resident of Mars. To earn his freedom, he has to help Mieli find something that he has hidden from himself, for reasons that he has forgotten. Meanwhile on Mars, Isadore helps the Gentleman solve a murder involving the taste of chocolate. Little do any of them expect to become entangled with each other, and with conspiracies that extend throughout Martian society and possibly even beyond.

Yashima reviewed The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Jean le Flambeur, #1)

Review of 'The Quantum Thief' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I finished this quickly because I felt if I stopped reading at any one point, I might forget something and the book was confusing enough as it was. The world building is terrific but also somewhat backwards - not for those who crave a lot of explanations, those do come later, but by then ... the story is also very complex and I still think I missed a few details. I liked the concepts, the world and the characters. I might even read the next book about the Thief.