The Quantum Thief

[gareth_rees]

Jean le Flambeur, gentleman thief, is sprung from prison by the beautiful Mieli, who persuades him to undertake one last job. Author Hannu Rajaniemi works hard to obscure the familiar outline of this hoariest of heist plots, by layering on the worldbling with a trowel:

The hidden Sobornost tech beneath the Oortian sapphire coral wakes up. The spidership reconfigures itself. The scattered modules pull themselves together along their tethers and fuse together into a tight, hard cone. The q-dot winglets transform from a perfectly reflective material into a diamond-hard firewall. Just in time, before the Archon’s nanomissiles hit.

I do like the experience of being confronted by a complex fictional world and having to make sense of it. ( But I also like to feel that there is in fact some sense to be made, and in this novel I frequently failed to make it. )