It’s a challenge, but it’s a challenge that SF readers will relish indeed, it’s one of the reasons why a lot of us read Science Fiction in the first place.Īt least there’s some comfort to be found in the plotting. For a while, the narrative hovers at the edge of understanding, with just enough connecting tissue to keep going, but with a strong sense of alienation that underscores how different this future can feel.īut this is a classic case of how high-end genre Science Fiction should work: From incluing to demonstrative definitions, SF has developed its own strategies for presenting imagined worlds, and Rajaniemi is playing that particular world-building game as well as anyone else currently writing. The opening segment is like being thrown in a lake with vague instructions on how to swim. In-between gevulots, googols, Tzaddikim, Sobornost and spimescapes, there’s enough new vocabulary in The Quantum Thief to make you feel as if you’re learning a new language in order to appreciate the novel. It’s invigorating, it’s filled with ideas and it’s firmly steeped inside the core assumptions of the genre.īut you’re going to have to work in order to enjoy it, perhaps a bit more than you may expect.

Almost as an afterthought, we’re led to understand that the plot outline has something to do with a super-competent gentleman thief, a daring prison escape and an even more daring heist.Īfter reading the book, a few things are still true: The Quantum Thief is indeed the debut SF novel of the year and it does herald the arrival of a major new talent. The best first SF novel I’ve read in many years.”), and virtually everything else about the book seems optimized to appeal to genre SF quirks. Charles Stross’s cover blurb is designed to make any jaded hard-SF fan perk up (“Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am. Helped along by enthusiastic praise by People in the Know (starting with Charles Stross, who not only provided an eye-popping cover blurb, but started talking about the novel months before publication), The Quantum Thief was eagerly awaited an anomaly given the author’s thin bibliography at shorter lengths –The last first SF novel with so much buzz was Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and it came after several Hugo-nominated short stories.Ī quick look at the cover blurb is enough to sustain any enthusiasm: We’re promised an exciting future adventure filled with reliable SF buzzwords from bizarre post-humans to dazzling hard SF. Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief was easily the most-anticipated first SF novel of 2010.

The quantum thief review