Sunday, September 13, 2020

The Quantum Thief

Title: Quantum Thief
Author: Hannu Rajaniemi
Publisher: Gollancz/Tor

For a while there you could just call everything “nano” and science fiction audiences would just nod their heads and accept anything you shoveled their way. Nanobots, sure, Nanomissiles, why not, Nanowrimo, knock yourself out. Of course, today’s audiences are far more intelligent, perceptive and sophisticated. Now, you have to call everything “quantum.” Much better, isn’t it. Quantum Thief is less a novel than the result of putting a mathematics textbook in a blender and printing whatever words dribble out the other end. Archons and cryptarchs and warminds and gevulot and phoboi and yes, whenever the writers of Bungie’s online shooter game “Destiny” had writer’s block they flipped open a random page of this book and used the first word that they saw. It’s normally at this point where I try to explain what the story is about but you know, I haven’t the faintest fucking clue. Couldn’t even tell you if the title means the thief is quantum or he steals quantum or what either of those things would entail. In any event, he’s rescued from the archons and warminds inside an infinite prison where he has to play a real-life version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, why I don’t know, by a Finnish woman, her flirtatious spaceship and the voice of God if god was an amorous Italian woman. Again, I don’t know why said rescue happens, it just does. Because of Quantum. They all fly to Mars where there’s a walking city in which everyone has physical privacy settings, communicates by sharing GIFs (no change there, then) and is immortal but periodically dies and spends time as a mindless servant before going back to being alive again and no, I don’t know why. Said city is also inhabited by a colony of “zoku” who are basically Quantum gamers. The thief goes to the walking city to steal something, what I’m not clear on, in order to establish proof of something, again your guess is as good as mine, but also to find some of his lost memories, can’t help you there, and in the process reveals some big secret about the walking city’s past, who tf knows at this point, before the big climactic showdown with the cryptarch, shruggie dot emoji. Quantum. His Finnish rescuer hates him at first but then doesn’t, because he takes her to karaoke, and frankly this is exactly the opposite of what I find happens every time I go to karaoke with a female companion, perhaps because I’m not a dashing, debonair thief of the quantum variety, but also perhaps because I have a signing voice that sounds like a bronchial parrot with a stutter. Anyway, the effect is sort of dizzyingly amusing for the first third of the book or so but then you slowly realize there’s no getting off this quantumly wordy tilt-a-whirl and you’re going to be completely in the dark about everyone’s motivations or what they’re even trying to do right up until the final page. At which point, they proudly announced they’ve done whatever it was they were trying to do. Huzzah. Good for them. It’s all giddily, sprawlingly, psychedelically inventive, but it’s a bit Jackson Pollock painting in the way words are kind of splattered across the pages and you fucking figure it out. The protagonist is more annoying than raffish, the detective on his trail sherlockian without putting any of the deductive effort into it, the gamer zoku are a hoot but in the book far less than they should’ve been, an the two main female characters don’t do much except get exasperated with the hero and occasionally try to kill him until at the end when they don’t and do the exact opposite instead. Quantum.

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