Showing posts with label Hannu Rajaniemi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hannu Rajaniemi. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 August 2013
The Fractal Prince
Hannu Rajaniemi
Gollancz (gollancz.co.uk)
978-0-575-08892-4
Hannu Rajaniemi is a magnificent bastard of a novelist, who – to echo a line I used it reviewing his previous novel – manages to both have his cake and eat it. (There’s probably a quantum physics joke in there, but let’s leave it and move on.) The universe of The Fractal Prince is literally littered with hard science concepts, or at least enough hints and plausible techno-jargon that you can’t really tell the difference. At the same time, it’s high-action space opera of the very best kind, full of stunning set pieces and future-powered superhumanisms that seem specifically tailored to drill straight into the still-teenaged hindbrain of your average SF geek and make it squee with delight.
It’s hard to balance cleverness and credibility with awesome fun, but Rajaniemi appear to do it effortlessly. And speaking of magnificent bastards, protagonist Jean le Flambeur – already a wonderful character, combining various parts of a dozen criminal archetypes from the witty gentleman conman to the nerdy hacker/safecracker – here gets a chance to develop in interesting ways. In The Quantum Thief le Flambeur’s charm made him effortlessly likeable, but the hints of the older, nastier Jean he’d left behind made him deeply compelling. The Fractal Prince puts a hunter on his trail and raises the stakes, forcing le Flambeur to reveal a little more of himself – even as he cloaks himself in other people’s stories.
He’s not the only one who’s roleplaying, either, because at its heart this is a story about stories. le Flambeur and his partner-captors have left Mars behind for the ruins of Earth, and the majority of the novel takes place in the unashamedly Arabian days of the city of Sirr, which appears to be the only surviving bastion of flesh-and-blood humanity left on Earth.
That it has withstood the relentless all-consumption of the Sobornost minds is thanks to its stories – the self-replicating memes and body thieves of the wildcode desert are enough to make even the godlike uploaded intelligences of the Sobornost founders think twice.
Like the Martian Oubliette of The Quantum Thief, Sirr is an astonishingly imaginative and well-realised place. To tell you much about it would be to spoil the joy of discovery, but it’s a place of jinn and spices, of palaces and minarets built out sideways from the kilometre-long Shards of a fallen orbital.
And again like Oubliette, Sirr has its particular theme – a theme which, like that of Oubliette, informs the structure of its novel’s narrative. About halfway through the novel comes a line of apparently throwaway dialogue – ‘Sometimes it is more important to hear how a story is told than what the story is’ (p.154) – but it’s more telling than its circumstances suggest. The Fractal Prince wears the conceit gleefully, looping threads of narrative round and round itself in such a way that any attempt to describe their tangled skein would probably require a flipchart.
In lesser hands you’d end up with a confusing web, and in truth it’s a more sophisticated reader than me who can join all the dots on a single read-through – particularly what motivations the villain and even whether his plot makes any damn sense at all. But as with The Quantum Thief it just about ties together on re-reading, and while I might have hoped that in his second novel Rajaniemi’s might have found a way to tighten up one of the few flaws of his debut, the plot is (as that line I mentioned earlier suggests) almost irrelevant.
The same logic applies to the ideas. Rajaniemi’s science bears the stamp of authenticity, as you’d probably expect from a chap with a Ph.D in Mathematic Physics, but unlike a lot of hard science authors he manages to fold the technical aspects into the ongoing narrative in such a way that they enhance, rather than distracting from, the tale being told. Mainly this is thanks to Rajaniemi’s extreme aversion to the expositionary infodump; where we learn about the background details of his setting it’s organically, through the interaction of the characters rather than some intrusive narrator bringing the story to a crashing halt.
It’s slightly less subtly handled here than in the preceding novel – particularly an interlude regarding what feels like a Macguffin-to-be, the Kaminari Jewel – but one of the many blessings of The Fractal Prince’s layered, self-referential narrative is that it makes the scene-breaking nature of the various flashbacks, flashsidewayses, and flashvirtuals a virtue rather than a flaw.
Nonetheless, you do get a better idea of what drives the various factions – particularly the Sobornost, who (while relatively incidental) were fairly inscrutable in The Quantum Thief. What you learn is genuinely original, and fairly mind-boggling at that. The Sobornost are making war on death, on the inherent unpredictability of quantum principles: ‘the taming of physics… taking the dice from God’s hand, the creation of a new Universe with new rules… where all those who died can live again, turning away from the laws written down by a mad god’ (p.142). It’s like the solar system’s most epic temper tantrum ever, railing against the unfairness of a random universe by retreating into a virtuality which follows more rational, classical rules. It’s genius.
About the only place the novel falls down – or stumbles, at least – is in the way it handles the payoff from the conclusion of The Quantum Thief. It feels a little too lightweight after all the drama and shenanigans back on Mars, though it does lead to an excellent virtual face-off in a forest full of menace and tigers, oh my. I think the likely cause of the problem is The Fractal Prince’s circular structure, again – by the time this last thread from the last novel is tied up, we’ve already moved on in triplicate.
But if the worst thing you can say about a book is that it hasn’t quite managed 0% plot fat, it does tend to suggest a reviewer struggling to find points of criticism. So go, reader – run to your local book emporium and buy The Fractal Prince. Read it now.
I’ll wait.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
The Quantum Thief
Hannu Rajaniemi
Gollancz (orionbooks.co.uk)
978-1-575-08888-7
Every now and then an authorial début attracts the kind of attention usually reserved for the second coming of Christ, the launch of a new iPhone or some equally monumental happening. The Quantum Thief was one of these, appearing on the shelves with the ringing endorsement of various stars of the SF pantheon. And it’s almost, almost as good as they say it is.
To start at the start, the opening line is an absolute gem:
As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk. (p.1)
It’s a fascinating idea, barely given time to breathe before Jean is broken out of the prison – and perhaps that’s just as well, because there’s only so many times you can replay the Prisoner’s Dilemma before it becomes a kind of prison for the reader, too. But the swiftness of the pace in this opening chapter is brutally unforgiving, hurling concepts and terminology at the reader and expecting them to keep up.
It’s a risky strategy which could easily intimidate and overwhelm, but Rajaniemi tempers the information overload with a snappy, stylish delivery which just about manages to keep the novel from capsizing.
Things stabilise quickly after the breakout, once Jean and his rescuer – and her sentient spaceship – evade their pursuers and come to a delicate truce, and the novel settles into a comfortable, slower (but by no means sedate) rhythm as they head to Oubliette, the moving Martian city which is the main setting for most of the novel.
That’s not to say that the flow of ideas slows to a trickle, however. Oubliette has a time-based economy where the population are eventually, once their allocated time runs out, re-uploaded into beings called Quiet to carry out various necessary public functions until they’ve earned back the right to exist as themselves.
Even more complex and fascinating is Oubliette’s social structure, which takes the currently-raging privacy debate to an extreme but logically solid conclusion; every citizen has a ‘privacy sense’ or gevulot which allows them to limit how much of themselves they share – including memories, names, faces and even their physical presence:
‘Let’s have a look at the agora memory – like this.’ The sensation is sudden, like finally finding the word that was at the tip of your tongue. Mieli remembers seeing the agora from high up, in incredible detail, knowing that she can recall every face in the crowd. She has a clear memory of the thief running across the agora.
“Oh,” the Gentleman says. There is a sudden gevulot request from him asking her to forget his reaction. She accepts…(p.103)
The concept is fresh and fascinating, and impeccably well thought-through, from its effects on Oubliette’s social mores to the inevitable ways people find to get around it – ‘analogue holes’ such as newspapers, for example, which are technically illegal but tolerated:
There are pictures; a black-and-white shot of him… The awareness that people he has not shared gevulot with now know who he is and what he has done makes him feel dirty. The gentleman at the next table is looking at him sharply now. He pays quickly, wraps himself in privacy and makes his way home. (p.121)
The way Rajaniemi presents this and other ideas – as fragments and passing asides, building up a sensation of depth through an organic layering of information – can be a little intimidating, but it’s a technique which comes with its own rewards. The barrage of ideas and unfamiliar words grant the world they inhabit a bewildering, complexity, at once filled with alien concepts and strangely familiar in its richness and variation. Every concept and location reveals itself as just another small cog, meshing with what’s come before and hinting at the shape of a larger, interlocking machine. And it gives The Quantum Thief longevity as a novel, as well; terms and events you took on faith the first time round develop an additional richness on re-reading, granted additional context by your foreknowledge.
This is fractal worldbuilding, a whole made up of little details which are themselves comprised of smaller parts within, and down and down the rabbit hole. It’s not always perfect, unfortunately, and certain aspects of the setting start to look a little shaky when you focus on them too hard. For example, how is the Martian space elevator anchored to a moving city without centrifugal forces plucking the scuttling settlement off the face of the planet? And what are the exact mechanics of Oubliette’s time economy – one character, a ‘millenniaire’ possessed of thousands of years, dies like any other man as his Watch winds down – so are time (money) and time (remaining until Quiet) not the same thing? Everyone in Oubliette acts as though they are, and yet.
But for the most part the setting is well thought-through, and rewarding to think about. This is the sort of novel which isn’t just great entertainment. Its refusal to condescend is an education, in that it makes you want to go away and look things up you didn’t understand – the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in my case – and rewards you when you do, with little in-jokes and nuggets of deeper insight.
It’s worth taking a moment to talk about the Shakespearean flair of the language, too. The Quantum Thief has a vocabulary all its own, mixing quirky neologisms with re-purposed words from across the globe: zoku, gogol, qupt, q-dots, archons, Sobornost, spime, tzaddik, gevulot, exomemory, vasilev and guberniya, among others.
Again, there’s little in the way of hand-holding – the words are allowed to glitter and tantalise un-exposited, building a sense of both the alien-ness of the setting and its complexity. Yet it’s astonishing how the reader’s assimilation of the novel’s vocabulary subtly aids suspension of disbelief, easing them into a living, breathing world.
For all that this is a glimpse of a far-future, truly posthuman society – and handles its posthumanism seriously, with talk of requiring ‘permissions’ to access a body’s full superhuman capabilities, and discussion of body designers’ taste in movie star – The Quantum Thief wears its science lightly. As in other areas, the novel prefers to skip lightly across the surface of its concepts, rather than getting bogged down in the dense technicalities which are a common danger of ‘hard’ SF.
Content to let the science tick away in the background, the plot calls on older, pulpier forms, hinted at in the belle époque flavour of Oubliette society and architecture, and outright waved in your face when one character is gifted a genetically engineered Cthuloid monstrosity as a pet and names it ‘Sherlock’.
Because both main threads of the plot are detective fiction of sorts, with Jean le Flambeur trying to hunt down whatever parts of himself he left on Mars, and a teenage super-sleuth becoming mixed up in a cryptographic conspiracy that goes to the heart of Oubliette society. In this way The Quantum Thief gets to both have its cake and eat it, wrapping an intelligent, challenging piece of SF in the slick and entertaining tropes of a space-opera detective novel.
Even the action is first-class, drawing on high-tech superhumanism to create thrilling and sensational set pieces. Rajaniemi does indulge in the overused trick of winding time down to a crawl, but here it’s a necessary evil; on one occasion we see the action from an unenhanced participant’s perspective, and it’s a nightmarish blur of impossibly fast sound and fury.
The action isn’t frivolous, either, but given the weight of consequence. A particularly exciting knock-down drag-out faceoff between two augmented characters comes to a screeching halt when both, having temporarily shut down each other’s techno-superpowers, realise the third person in the room is pointing an antique (ie 20th-century tech) revolver in their direction. Even when death is mostly temporary, it doesn’t seem to be taken lightly.
So. The novel’s first and second acts are brilliant, effortlessly balancing the interweaving plot lines with a perfect evocation of a living, breathing – and very alien – society. If The Quantum Thief falls down anywhere, however, it’s in the climax. The pace picks up as it’s supposed to, and the stakes are suitably elevated, but the brilliantly-evoked setting begins to get a little motion-blurred.
Too much happening, too fast – for the first time you’re reminded that this is Rajaniemi’s début novel, as the climax teeters on the edge of incoherence. It just about holds together, but it takes a close re-reading before all the motivations which drive it start to make sense – and having to stop and puzzle out what exactly is going on isn’t terribly compatible with the last act’s breakneck flow.
Nonetheless, it’s to The Quantum Thief’s credit that the plot is completely driven by character motivation rather than the other way around. And there’s a lot more to recommend, from the novel’s sly wit and superb characterisation to the hints at how this world links back to our own. The zoku, for example, appear to be an evolution of twentieth-century gaming clans into a sort of quantum-entangled socialist collective, swapping and reshaping their virtual and physical presences with casual indifference and gamifying everything from relationships to war.
But it feels like going into any further detail would be to spoil the pleasure of discovery. While some of the ideas might not be all that new, it’s the way they’re realised that is The Quantum Thief’s real joy. And now this review is finished, I’m off to read the sequel.
Gollancz (orionbooks.co.uk)
978-1-575-08888-7
Every now and then an authorial début attracts the kind of attention usually reserved for the second coming of Christ, the launch of a new iPhone or some equally monumental happening. The Quantum Thief was one of these, appearing on the shelves with the ringing endorsement of various stars of the SF pantheon. And it’s almost, almost as good as they say it is.
To start at the start, the opening line is an absolute gem:
As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk. (p.1)
It’s a great hook, throwing open a dozen intriguing questions, and its dust-dry wit speaks volumes about the man narrating it. Jean le Flambeur: posthuman, mind-thief, trickster and wag, the prisoner of the Axelrod Archons.
And prisoner is the operative part of that description, at least as far as the first chapter is concerned, because Jean is an inmate of the Dilemma Prison, forced to play endless iterative games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma – a classic example of game theory, in which combinations of cooperation and defection between the two participants prompt various patterns of reward and punishment – against his fellow inmates. Over thousands and thousands of iterations, the inescapable logic of the system will burn away the selfish, sociopathic inclination to betray, turning career criminals into cooperative, productive citizens.
It’s a fascinating idea, barely given time to breathe before Jean is broken out of the prison – and perhaps that’s just as well, because there’s only so many times you can replay the Prisoner’s Dilemma before it becomes a kind of prison for the reader, too. But the swiftness of the pace in this opening chapter is brutally unforgiving, hurling concepts and terminology at the reader and expecting them to keep up.
It’s a risky strategy which could easily intimidate and overwhelm, but Rajaniemi tempers the information overload with a snappy, stylish delivery which just about manages to keep the novel from capsizing.
Things stabilise quickly after the breakout, once Jean and his rescuer – and her sentient spaceship – evade their pursuers and come to a delicate truce, and the novel settles into a comfortable, slower (but by no means sedate) rhythm as they head to Oubliette, the moving Martian city which is the main setting for most of the novel.
That’s not to say that the flow of ideas slows to a trickle, however. Oubliette has a time-based economy where the population are eventually, once their allocated time runs out, re-uploaded into beings called Quiet to carry out various necessary public functions until they’ve earned back the right to exist as themselves.
Even more complex and fascinating is Oubliette’s social structure, which takes the currently-raging privacy debate to an extreme but logically solid conclusion; every citizen has a ‘privacy sense’ or gevulot which allows them to limit how much of themselves they share – including memories, names, faces and even their physical presence:
‘Let’s have a look at the agora memory – like this.’ The sensation is sudden, like finally finding the word that was at the tip of your tongue. Mieli remembers seeing the agora from high up, in incredible detail, knowing that she can recall every face in the crowd. She has a clear memory of the thief running across the agora.
“Oh,” the Gentleman says. There is a sudden gevulot request from him asking her to forget his reaction. She accepts…(p.103)
The concept is fresh and fascinating, and impeccably well thought-through, from its effects on Oubliette’s social mores to the inevitable ways people find to get around it – ‘analogue holes’ such as newspapers, for example, which are technically illegal but tolerated:
There are pictures; a black-and-white shot of him… The awareness that people he has not shared gevulot with now know who he is and what he has done makes him feel dirty. The gentleman at the next table is looking at him sharply now. He pays quickly, wraps himself in privacy and makes his way home. (p.121)
The way Rajaniemi presents this and other ideas – as fragments and passing asides, building up a sensation of depth through an organic layering of information – can be a little intimidating, but it’s a technique which comes with its own rewards. The barrage of ideas and unfamiliar words grant the world they inhabit a bewildering, complexity, at once filled with alien concepts and strangely familiar in its richness and variation. Every concept and location reveals itself as just another small cog, meshing with what’s come before and hinting at the shape of a larger, interlocking machine. And it gives The Quantum Thief longevity as a novel, as well; terms and events you took on faith the first time round develop an additional richness on re-reading, granted additional context by your foreknowledge.
This is fractal worldbuilding, a whole made up of little details which are themselves comprised of smaller parts within, and down and down the rabbit hole. It’s not always perfect, unfortunately, and certain aspects of the setting start to look a little shaky when you focus on them too hard. For example, how is the Martian space elevator anchored to a moving city without centrifugal forces plucking the scuttling settlement off the face of the planet? And what are the exact mechanics of Oubliette’s time economy – one character, a ‘millenniaire’ possessed of thousands of years, dies like any other man as his Watch winds down – so are time (money) and time (remaining until Quiet) not the same thing? Everyone in Oubliette acts as though they are, and yet.
But for the most part the setting is well thought-through, and rewarding to think about. This is the sort of novel which isn’t just great entertainment. Its refusal to condescend is an education, in that it makes you want to go away and look things up you didn’t understand – the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in my case – and rewards you when you do, with little in-jokes and nuggets of deeper insight.
It’s worth taking a moment to talk about the Shakespearean flair of the language, too. The Quantum Thief has a vocabulary all its own, mixing quirky neologisms with re-purposed words from across the globe: zoku, gogol, qupt, q-dots, archons, Sobornost, spime, tzaddik, gevulot, exomemory, vasilev and guberniya, among others.
Again, there’s little in the way of hand-holding – the words are allowed to glitter and tantalise un-exposited, building a sense of both the alien-ness of the setting and its complexity. Yet it’s astonishing how the reader’s assimilation of the novel’s vocabulary subtly aids suspension of disbelief, easing them into a living, breathing world.
For all that this is a glimpse of a far-future, truly posthuman society – and handles its posthumanism seriously, with talk of requiring ‘permissions’ to access a body’s full superhuman capabilities, and discussion of body designers’ taste in movie star – The Quantum Thief wears its science lightly. As in other areas, the novel prefers to skip lightly across the surface of its concepts, rather than getting bogged down in the dense technicalities which are a common danger of ‘hard’ SF.
Content to let the science tick away in the background, the plot calls on older, pulpier forms, hinted at in the belle époque flavour of Oubliette society and architecture, and outright waved in your face when one character is gifted a genetically engineered Cthuloid monstrosity as a pet and names it ‘Sherlock’.
Because both main threads of the plot are detective fiction of sorts, with Jean le Flambeur trying to hunt down whatever parts of himself he left on Mars, and a teenage super-sleuth becoming mixed up in a cryptographic conspiracy that goes to the heart of Oubliette society. In this way The Quantum Thief gets to both have its cake and eat it, wrapping an intelligent, challenging piece of SF in the slick and entertaining tropes of a space-opera detective novel.
Even the action is first-class, drawing on high-tech superhumanism to create thrilling and sensational set pieces. Rajaniemi does indulge in the overused trick of winding time down to a crawl, but here it’s a necessary evil; on one occasion we see the action from an unenhanced participant’s perspective, and it’s a nightmarish blur of impossibly fast sound and fury.
The action isn’t frivolous, either, but given the weight of consequence. A particularly exciting knock-down drag-out faceoff between two augmented characters comes to a screeching halt when both, having temporarily shut down each other’s techno-superpowers, realise the third person in the room is pointing an antique (ie 20th-century tech) revolver in their direction. Even when death is mostly temporary, it doesn’t seem to be taken lightly.
So. The novel’s first and second acts are brilliant, effortlessly balancing the interweaving plot lines with a perfect evocation of a living, breathing – and very alien – society. If The Quantum Thief falls down anywhere, however, it’s in the climax. The pace picks up as it’s supposed to, and the stakes are suitably elevated, but the brilliantly-evoked setting begins to get a little motion-blurred.
Too much happening, too fast – for the first time you’re reminded that this is Rajaniemi’s début novel, as the climax teeters on the edge of incoherence. It just about holds together, but it takes a close re-reading before all the motivations which drive it start to make sense – and having to stop and puzzle out what exactly is going on isn’t terribly compatible with the last act’s breakneck flow.
Nonetheless, it’s to The Quantum Thief’s credit that the plot is completely driven by character motivation rather than the other way around. And there’s a lot more to recommend, from the novel’s sly wit and superb characterisation to the hints at how this world links back to our own. The zoku, for example, appear to be an evolution of twentieth-century gaming clans into a sort of quantum-entangled socialist collective, swapping and reshaping their virtual and physical presences with casual indifference and gamifying everything from relationships to war.
But it feels like going into any further detail would be to spoil the pleasure of discovery. While some of the ideas might not be all that new, it’s the way they’re realised that is The Quantum Thief’s real joy. And now this review is finished, I’m off to read the sequel.
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