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A review by timinbc
The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi
4.0
Maybe I'm not smart enough to appreciate this work fully. But it is also possible that the emperor has no clothes and this book is egregiously pretentious.
I'm giving it four stars because the author has constructed an admirable origami of a book. I was tempted to go with three or fewer because I didn't particularly enjoy reading the book [note: the author has no obligation to provide with enjoyment] and also because far too often I found myself groaning, "Oh, come ON!" as we get stuff like this:
"There are machines within the Gourd, built over decades by the Hsien-ku, gogol factories and smartmatter moulds and picotech fabbers. The pellegrini tells them to make angels."
Sometimes it feels as if Rajaniemi dropped a high-level textbook into a blender while stoned.
We have virtual thises and thats, multiple instances of entities, almost no distinction between entities that are real, virtual and possibly imaginary. And whenever things slow down someone speaks a Secret Name which by its actions might as well be, "Hey Presto!" or "Shazam!" or "Abracadabra!" or "Ego sum Deus ex machina!" - because it's not only garden-variety Edgar-Rice-Burroughs "with a mighty leap he escaped the inescapable pit," but it's that kind of stuff that means NO situation is EVER inescapable, and ANYTHING can happen - so where's the danger?
Near the end, a character spawns multiple instances of itself and uses them to fight an army. I failed to see why all sorts of other characters who were present couldn't have done the same thing back.
So after two books, I still haven't decided whether Rajaniemi has produced a masterpiece or an esoteric in-joke. But I have never, after many books of VERY hard sci-fi, seen a book that so clearly matched up with the old saying, "If you can't dazzle them with science, baffle them with bullshit."
I'm giving it four stars because the author has constructed an admirable origami of a book. I was tempted to go with three or fewer because I didn't particularly enjoy reading the book [note: the author has no obligation to provide with enjoyment] and also because far too often I found myself groaning, "Oh, come ON!" as we get stuff like this:
"There are machines within the Gourd, built over decades by the Hsien-ku, gogol factories and smartmatter moulds and picotech fabbers. The pellegrini tells them to make angels."
Sometimes it feels as if Rajaniemi dropped a high-level textbook into a blender while stoned.
We have virtual thises and thats, multiple instances of entities, almost no distinction between entities that are real, virtual and possibly imaginary. And whenever things slow down someone speaks a Secret Name which by its actions might as well be, "Hey Presto!" or "Shazam!" or "Abracadabra!" or "Ego sum Deus ex machina!" - because it's not only garden-variety Edgar-Rice-Burroughs "with a mighty leap he escaped the inescapable pit," but it's that kind of stuff that means NO situation is EVER inescapable, and ANYTHING can happen - so where's the danger?
Near the end, a character spawns multiple instances of itself and uses them to fight an army. I failed to see why all sorts of other characters who were present couldn't have done the same thing back.
So after two books, I still haven't decided whether Rajaniemi has produced a masterpiece or an esoteric in-joke. But I have never, after many books of VERY hard sci-fi, seen a book that so clearly matched up with the old saying, "If you can't dazzle them with science, baffle them with bullshit."