2010 science fiction, first of a trilogy. Jean le Flambeur is a thief,
broken out of prison to steal something very special. But first he
must steal back his own history…
This is unabashedly transhumanist writing, where a human mind can
run on a computer that fits in a bullet, and does. The city on Mars
moves constantly, carried by engineered creatures which are also those
citizens who've run out of Time and must therefore be non-conscious
entities for a while, before they are resurrected. But it's also
writing so in love with its own ideas that it never stops to consider
whether they make any sort of sense.
For example: we open with Jean in the Dilemma Prison, a virtual space
where the inmates reenact the Prisoner's Dilemma endlessly in the hope
of reforming them. But while the idea is an interesting one,
Rajaniemi's so eager to go on to the next thing that the rewards for
cooperating or defecting become a nonsense. Never mind! More ideas!
You know, when this is over, I'm going to kill him, Mieli tells
Perhonen, smiling at the thief.
Without torturing him first? the ship says. You are getting soft.
There are Great Big Powers out there, and this is very much the sort
of book where everything you thought you knew is going to be revealed
to be wrong because someone was manipulating it all the time. Combine
that with a lack of explanation of most of the specialised terms, and
this is definitely something for the seasoned SF reader rather than
for someone who was just hoping for a good story.
'It's an honour to meet you,' Isidore says. 'She never mentioned you
before. Or her father. Is he around?'
'Perhaps she didn't want to confuse you. I like to use the word
"mother", but it is a little more complicated than that. Let us say
that there was an incident in the Protocol War involving me and a
captured Sobornost warmind.'
And it's fine to give me a puzzle-setting if that puzzle is going to
have an interesting solution rather than just "an even bigger entity
did it, for inscrutable reasons of its own".
There's lots of shiny nanotech and picotech and quantum tech, and
never a thought given to where all the power comes from – or goes to.
Put up an impregnable building in seconds? Sure! (Without vaporising
the surrounding city.)
But more seriously, perhaps in an attempt to make things
comprehensible to the reader, in among all this technology the
posthumans who make up the cast are more than anything else obsessed
with sex and late-20th-century-style relationships. Culture apparently
didn't develop at all after 2010, except where it was forced to by
technology. There's even an MMO raiding guild, long outliving the
actual MMO but playing at it in what passes for real life.
(Mieli, Jean's enigmatic partner who's working for someone else, is
motivated entirely by the hope that she can get back to her lover
Sydän. She knows that memories and feelings can be manipulated. She
never even considers that this particular feeling might have been
put there synthetically in order to get her cooperation. It seemed to
me so screamingly obvious that I was waiting impatiently for someone
to notice; but I guess that's for a later book in the series.)
Many people whose opinions I respect love this book. For me, less so:
the writing's OK, the ideas are great if thrown at the page more than
thought through, but the characters are purest soap-opera cardboard
(and they're all obsessed with our endlessly fascinating hero, even
himself). There's never any sense of tension, because you know that
Rajaniemi will just pull out yet another miracle from the infinite bag
of them that he's holding behind his back. If you can go along with
the action and not try to think through the implications of the parade
of wonders, you can have a good time; but that's not what I read
science fiction for.
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