The Quantum Thief

Setting

Several centuries after the technological singularity largely destroyed Earth, posthuman factions compete for dominance in the Solar System. Sentient superintelligent AGI was never successfully developed, but Hansonian brain emulations called gogols have transformed civilization. An alliance of powerful gogol copies, the Sobornost, rule the inner system from computronium megastructures, laboring to resurrect the dead in devotion to Nikolai Fedorov. They conflict with the Zoku, a community of quantum entangled minds that adhere to the no-cloning principle.

Most of the Zoku were devastated when Jupiter was destroyed with a weaponized gravitational singularity. Near-baseline humanity survives on the mobile cities of Mars, where advanced cryptography prevents the Sobornost from uploading minds. The most notable city is the Oubliette, where time is used as currency; when a citizen's balance reaches zero, their mind is transferred to a robotic body to serve the city.

Plot summary

Countless gogols of the thief Jean Le Flambeur are trapped in a virtual Sobornost prison, playing an iterated prisoner's dilemma until his mind learns to cooperate. A warrior from the Oort Cloud, Mieli, retrieves one gogol and uploads it into a real-space body. Acting for a competing Sobornost authority, she ferries the thief to the Martian city the Oubliette, where he stored his memories. On the Oubliette, detective Isidore Beautrelet helps vigilantes catch Sobornost agents uploading minds; the vigilantes serve a local Zoku colony.

Beautrelet investigates Le Flambeur's arrival and learns the city's cryptographic security was compromised, its citizens' memories are fabrications, and the King of Mars, another Le Flambeur copy, still reigns. Le Flambeur fails to recover all his memories, which were locked with a quantum entangled revolver requiring him to kill old friends. He and Mieli escape with only a mysterious Schrödinger's Box.

Themes

In the Martian society of the Oubliette, people possess two kinds of memory: a private, personal one and a shared exomemory that anyone in the city can tap into. These shared memories can be divided into sections with different viewing permissions, and they even serve as a quick way to communicate. Time itself is the local currency; once a person runs out, their mind is loaded into a Quiet—a silent, robotic servant that tends the city, still holding faint echoes of its former self.

The story’s secret plot involves hidden rulers, the cryptarchs, who twist both exomemory and traditional memory for their own ends. The Oubliette works like a panopticon, a prison where every move can be watched. Major themes include how unreliable and bendable memory can be, how extreme lifespans warp a person’s view, and the role of prisons, surveillance, and control.

Reception

The novel received generally positive reviews. Gary K. Wolfe in Locus wrote that Rajaniemi spectacularly delivered on the promise that this is likely the most important debut SF novel of the year. James Lovegrove in the Financial Times noted that many an anglophone author would kill to turn out prose half as good, especially on a maiden effort. Eric Brown in The Guardian called it a brilliant debut, while alluding to the apocryphal myth that the novel sold on the strength of its first line.

Sam Bandah at SciFiNow praised its engaging narrative and characters backed by intimidatingly good sci-fi concepts. Criticism centered on Rajaniemi's sparse show-don't-tell style; Brown noted no concessions to the lazy reader. Niall Alexander of the Speculative Scotsman wished for an index during the mind-boggling first third, while calling it the sci-fi debut of 2010.

Did You Know?

• The first chapter was presented by Rajaniemi's literary agent John Jarrold to Gollancz as the basis for the three-book deal.
• Rajaniemi has stated he came up with an outline that had every single idea he could cram into it, because he wanted to be worthy of what had happened.
• The novel's plot was inspired by Maurice Leblanc's gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, particularly the cycles of redemption and relapse Lupin goes through.