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 at least a depth, foundations, explanations. A good example is the “Highway”:

“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.