ourboldhero's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
A far future mystery/caper with three main characters, only one of whom ends up being that compelling. But he's pretty compelling!
Is There Bad Space Sex?
Is There Bad Space Sex?
Spoiler
Yep! And do these fit with the tone of anything else in the book? Nope!isd's review against another edition
4.0
Toisella lukemalla, melkein seitsemän vuoden jälkeen Kvanttivaras suorastaan lensi silmien alla. Lähestulkoon kaiken olin ehtinyt unohtaa tai ainakin muistoparkani olivat ankarasti vääristyneet, mikä tietysti piti jännitystä yllä ja yllätykselliset juonenkäänteet hengissä. Hetkittäin muistin myös väärin odottaa asioita tapahtuvaksi, jotka tulevatkin tapahtumaan osissa 2 tai 3, vaan minkäs teet, se ei ole Kvanttivarkaan vika tai ongelma.
Kvanttikyberpunk-touhu on todella mielenkiintoista ja syvällisemmät viittaukset fysiikan saralla menivät luonnollisesti yli oman hilseeni. Parasta on, että kun uusi asia tulee vastaan (gevulot, kuptaaminen, gogolit, ...), mitään ei selitellä suoraan auki, vaan asiat yksityiskohtineen selviävät hissukseen tarinan mukana, sikäli kun selviävät. Maailma on mitä on, sen hahmot elävät siinä itsekseen ja sitä omaksutaan omaan tahtiin.
Olin edelleen riemuissani kun Varkaan viritellyn kehon / -oikeudet tulivat esiin ja ylipäätään viitattiin sekä siihen, että hänellä oli omaan fyysiseen kehoonsa rajalliset käyttöoikeudet, että myös siihen, että kertoja ei välttämättä olekaan Jean de Flambeur vaan tämän n:nnen sukupolven ilmentymä.
Kvanttikyberpunk-touhu on todella mielenkiintoista ja syvällisemmät viittaukset fysiikan saralla menivät luonnollisesti yli oman hilseeni. Parasta on, että kun uusi asia tulee vastaan (gevulot, kuptaaminen, gogolit, ...), mitään ei selitellä suoraan auki, vaan asiat yksityiskohtineen selviävät hissukseen tarinan mukana, sikäli kun selviävät. Maailma on mitä on, sen hahmot elävät siinä itsekseen ja sitä omaksutaan omaan tahtiin.
Olin edelleen riemuissani kun Varkaan viritellyn kehon / -oikeudet tulivat esiin ja ylipäätään viitattiin sekä siihen, että hänellä oli omaan fyysiseen kehoonsa rajalliset käyttöoikeudet, että myös siihen, että kertoja ei välttämättä olekaan Jean de Flambeur vaan tämän n:nnen sukupolven ilmentymä.
bookishnorth's review against another edition
challenging
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
gelisvb's review
3.0
This book until the 70% mark was incredible: full of multilayered characters, interesting plot, narrative meeting science, engaging and overall incredibly good.
Until 70% this book was an easy 5 stars.
Then the author decided to ruin his own book with disturbing things that made no sense or were plain weird and disturbing.
It's details so they are not truly spoilers, but I really don't want to read about the male protagonist having sex with the body of lesbian female protagonist and then not having any kind of repercussion and without even being blamed for it and there was no NEED for it to happen.It was plain disturbing.
Another WHY? thing was the romance between secondary characters;it was very, very badly handled, it felt like the author changed his mind halfway and for no reason. Why introducing it in the first place? How did that ended anyway? What was the point? Smart people are supposed to stay alone because they are unable to truly love someone? You already made that point with the protagonist, why introducing something that was just upsetting and ruining a good female character?
And the ending was rushed and not satisfying and confused.
Until 70% this book was an easy 5 stars.
Then the author decided to ruin his own book with disturbing things that made no sense or were plain weird and disturbing.
It's details so they are not truly spoilers, but I really don't want to read about the male protagonist having sex with the body of lesbian female protagonist and then not having any kind of repercussion and without even being blamed for it and there was no NEED for it to happen.It was plain disturbing.
Another WHY? thing was the romance between secondary characters;it was very, very badly handled, it felt like the author changed his mind halfway and for no reason. Why introducing it in the first place? How did that ended anyway? What was the point? Smart people are supposed to stay alone because they are unable to truly love someone? You already made that point with the protagonist, why introducing something that was just upsetting and ruining a good female character?
And the ending was rushed and not satisfying and confused.
iffer's review
4.0
In full disclosure, I definitely found myself having trouble paying attention to this book and keeping everything straight, so I probably need to read it again. That said, I really enjoyed it.
The Quantum Thief, though it borrows elements that readers of weird, mind-bending sci-fi would be familiar with (e.g. consciousness transfer and brain hacking), as well as rolling together an amnesia storyline, "one last heist" adventure, spy intrigue, and Sherlock-esque investigation, not only works, but seems refreshingly different.
At times, The Quantum Thief is pulpy, but the writing is solid. There are even times, such as the opening passages, that are brilliant in the imagery that they conjure.
Hasn't anyone picked up the rights to make this series into a movie yet?
The Quantum Thief, though it borrows elements that readers of weird, mind-bending sci-fi would be familiar with (e.g. consciousness transfer and brain hacking), as well as rolling together an amnesia storyline, "one last heist" adventure, spy intrigue, and Sherlock-esque investigation, not only works, but seems refreshingly different.
At times, The Quantum Thief is pulpy, but the writing is solid. There are even times, such as the opening passages, that are brilliant in the imagery that they conjure.
Hasn't anyone picked up the rights to make this series into a movie yet?
sunscour's review
4.0
This was an excellent hard science fiction story. I loved the mystery and the science. Thinking and memories, weird stuff.
roytoo's review
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
nickfourtimes's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
2.0
1) ”As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
‘Prisons are always the same, don't you think?’”
2) “‘This certainly does not seem like a lively neighbourhood.’ I indicate the starry field around us. ‘Where are we?’
‘The Neptunian Trojan belt. Arse-end of nowhere. I waited here for a long time, when she went to get you.
"You have a lot to learn about being a criminal. It's all about the waiting. Boredom punctuated by flashes of sheer terror. Sort of like war.’
‘Oh, war was much better,’ she says excitedly. ‘We were in the Protocol War. I loved it. You get to think so fast. Some of the things we did - we stole a moon, you know. It was amazing. Metis, just before the Spike: Mieli put a strangelet bomb in to push it out of orbit, like fireworks, you would not believe—‘
Suddenly, the ship is silent. I wonder if it realised it has said too much. But no: its attention is focused elsewhere.
In the distance, amidst the spiderweb of Perhonen's sails and the spimescape vectors and labels of habitats far away, there is a jewel of bright dots, a six-pointed star. I zoom in in the scape view. Dark ships, jagged and fang-like, a cluster of seven faces sculpted in their prows, the same faces that adorn every Sobornost structure, the Founders: god-kings with a trillion subjects. I used to go drinking with them.”
3) “The King of Mars can see everything, but there are places where he chooses not to look Usually, the spaceport is one of them. But today, he is there in person, to kill an old friend.”
4) “‘It's how we honour our heritage,’ the Eldest says. She has a powerful voice, like a singer.
‘Our zoku is an old one: we can trace our origins back to the pre-Collapse gaming clans.’ She smiles. ‘Some of us remember those times very well. This was just before the uploads took off. you understand. The competition was fierce, and you would take any chance to get an edge over a rival guild.
We were among the first who experimented with quantum economic mechanisms for collaboration. In the beginning, it was just two crazy otaku, working in a physics lab, stealing entangled ion trap qubits and plugging them into their gaming platforms, coordinating guild raids and making a killing in the auction houses. It turns out that you can do fun things with entanglement. Games become strange. Like Prisoner's Dilemma with telepathy. Perfect coordination. New game equilibria. We kicked ass and drowned in piles of gold.’”
5) “Mieli claims that her systems need to recharge and that she has some damage to regenerate, so she goes to bed early. Perhonen is quiet as well, dodging the orbital sentinels, no doubt; or hacking into their systems and manufacturing convincing excuses about why they lost her for a moment. So I am as alone as I have been since the escape from the Prison.
It feels good: I spend some time simply watching the night view of the city, on my balcony and drinking, single malt this time. Whisky has always tasted like introspection to me, a quiet moment after taking a sip, the lingering aftertaste, inviting you to ponder upon the flavours on your tongue.”
6) “I stand in the robot garden with my old self, weighing the gun in my hand. He is holding it too, or a dream reflection of it. It's strange how it always comes down to two men with guns, real or imaginary. Around us, the slow war of the ancient machines goes on.”
7) “His guberniya virscape is a machine garden, vast and blooming. The seeds he planted during the long Dyson winter when the guberniya slowed itself down to shed its waste heat have blossomed, and now there is variety, variety everywhere
His gogols swarm around him like a flock of white-coated birds as he plumbs its depths: plunging a billion pairs of hands into black soil where each particle is a cogwheel that fits together with its neighbours perfectly, to feel the seeds of new composite minds about to bloom.
Engineer-Prime himself is everywhere, directing the culling of this memetic tree, watching that flock of genetic algorithms alight into a new parameter space from a branching process.
With infinite gentleness he pulls up a freshly bloomed shoot of a newly made gogol, one with a rare disorder that makes it think its body would be made of glass, easily shattered: something he thought lost centuries ago.
Combined with an exquisite schizophrenia, it will result in a mind that can divide and recombine itself at will, integrating memories: something Matjek's warminds will love. He splits off a gogol to carry on the mundane details of the work, and returns his attention to the big picture, letting Engineer-Prime shoot upwards to the sky, white lab coat flapping in the fresh breeze. Yes, that patch there will yield a good harvest of Dragon-speakers. In that vast labyrinth, single-minded Pursuers are already gestating: soon they will be ready to explore parameter spaces larger than worlds, mathematical ants, combing the vast Gödel universe for unproven theorems.”
joelevard's review against another edition
4.0
There are authors who don't cotton to hand-holding, and then there are authors who drop you off in the middle of Times Square on New Year's Eve, distract you with a party favor, and then run the other way as fast as they can. Maybe you'll eventually find your way in the throng, even if you are tear-streaked and sniffling by the time you do (did I mention you are 5?). Maybe at the end of it you've learned something (most likely that there are a bunch of people in Times Square who desperately want you to attend a comedy show) and are a little stronger for it. Or your mind has snapped and you have been reduced to a blubbering, shell-shocked simpleton. Fifty-fifty.
Hannu Rajaniemi is, clearly, the latter type, and I'm still not quite sure what my trek through this book has done to me. Not since Neuromancer has a sci-fi book left me questioning how a bunch of words could be strung together in logical, well-crafted sentences and still not make any sense. Both books made me feel dumb and slow and a bad reader. I don't think this is my fault, but I also doubt it was the writers' intention.
See, they both create richly imagined new worlds out of reassembled bits and pieces of what we recognize as reality, mixing things up with new gadgets and technology and the repercussions of fictional disasters. And they just plop us down into these worlds and never, ever tell us what is going on.
I totally get avoiding exposition dumps and telling versus showing, but seriously, this book hurt my brain. There are concepts -- key plot concepts -- that the characters take as rote parts of their everyday lives that are introduced on page 1 and not clearly explained until maybe 75 percent of the way through the book. The primary antagonists are roughly sketched at best, and even though all the characters know who they are and what they're about, we don't get anything but hints up until the epilogue. But it's not just that -- technology is referenced again and again before we get an idea of what it does. For about half the book, I wasn't sure if it was happening inside of a computer or not. See what I mean about feeling dumb?
But it's ok for a few reasons. One, Hannu Rajaniemi lays down some of the sharpest prose I've encountered in genre writing, dense without feeling mannered, spare and yet evocative. This is a short novel by space opera standards, and he shows those bloated quasi-epics how it's done. (Of course, snipping out all that exposition is a good way to start.)
Two, the plot is a fairly straightforward Whodunnit mixed with elements of One Last Job, with a thief and a detective squaring off, sprinkled with a Mysterious Backstory and some small-r romance. When books make me work this hard, I don't mind if I can see some of the structure poking through. It's nice to have a clue if it's going to be able to support my weight.
Three, the SFnal ideas here are pretty great. Novel twists on familiar concepts (including a nifty take on the "uploading consciousness into the cloud" trope) are just the start; there's also this wonderful riff on our growing concern for privacy through the invention of a system that allows you to control what you share with people all the time. You can walk down the street cloaked in privacy, so anyone passing won't recognize you unless you want them to. You can even edit what parts of a conversation someone will be able to remember (which removes a lot of the potential awkwardness from one-night stands). Lots of sci-fi has explored they way memory shapes reality, but Rajaniemi manages to find a fresh angle.
So, should you read this? I'd say it depends on A) your comfort level with having no idea what the hell is happening for hundreds of pages, and B) your familiarity with the genre. Because while not the trickiest book I've ever read, this is hardly elementary school SF. That's what you get when you let Finnish mathematical physicists write books.
Hannu Rajaniemi is, clearly, the latter type, and I'm still not quite sure what my trek through this book has done to me. Not since Neuromancer has a sci-fi book left me questioning how a bunch of words could be strung together in logical, well-crafted sentences and still not make any sense. Both books made me feel dumb and slow and a bad reader. I don't think this is my fault, but I also doubt it was the writers' intention.
See, they both create richly imagined new worlds out of reassembled bits and pieces of what we recognize as reality, mixing things up with new gadgets and technology and the repercussions of fictional disasters. And they just plop us down into these worlds and never, ever tell us what is going on.
I totally get avoiding exposition dumps and telling versus showing, but seriously, this book hurt my brain. There are concepts -- key plot concepts -- that the characters take as rote parts of their everyday lives that are introduced on page 1 and not clearly explained until maybe 75 percent of the way through the book. The primary antagonists are roughly sketched at best, and even though all the characters know who they are and what they're about, we don't get anything but hints up until the epilogue. But it's not just that -- technology is referenced again and again before we get an idea of what it does. For about half the book, I wasn't sure if it was happening inside of a computer or not. See what I mean about feeling dumb?
But it's ok for a few reasons. One, Hannu Rajaniemi lays down some of the sharpest prose I've encountered in genre writing, dense without feeling mannered, spare and yet evocative. This is a short novel by space opera standards, and he shows those bloated quasi-epics how it's done. (Of course, snipping out all that exposition is a good way to start.)
Two, the plot is a fairly straightforward Whodunnit mixed with elements of One Last Job, with a thief and a detective squaring off, sprinkled with a Mysterious Backstory and some small-r romance. When books make me work this hard, I don't mind if I can see some of the structure poking through. It's nice to have a clue if it's going to be able to support my weight.
Three, the SFnal ideas here are pretty great. Novel twists on familiar concepts (including a nifty take on the "uploading consciousness into the cloud" trope) are just the start; there's also this wonderful riff on our growing concern for privacy through the invention of a system that allows you to control what you share with people all the time. You can walk down the street cloaked in privacy, so anyone passing won't recognize you unless you want them to. You can even edit what parts of a conversation someone will be able to remember (which removes a lot of the potential awkwardness from one-night stands). Lots of sci-fi has explored they way memory shapes reality, but Rajaniemi manages to find a fresh angle.
So, should you read this? I'd say it depends on A) your comfort level with having no idea what the hell is happening for hundreds of pages, and B) your familiarity with the genre. Because while not the trickiest book I've ever read, this is hardly elementary school SF. That's what you get when you let Finnish mathematical physicists write books.