The Quantum Thief

In a chase for science fiction literature similar to the greatness of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, Hannu Rajaniemi was one of the authors I have seen being recommended. I don't remember if that recommendation was in relation to hard scifi -- if so, I was mislead. I could have possibly made that assumption myself to based on Rajaniemi's background in math and physics. I wouldn't classify The Quantum Thief as hard scifi: the technology in its sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, too far on the hypothetical spectrum.

The Quantum Thief is a space opera, sort of a heist story. The closest comparison among the works I have read before would be House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. The technology has the same kind of feel to it and humanity is in a post-human state too although still seemingly confined within the Solar System.

Rajaniemi doesn't waste time on doing info dumbs, instead leaving you with many weird words and names until you eventually start picking up the concepts and meanings. Such focus on showing will work in the end but it sure leaves you with an extremely vague view of the novel's world for the longest time. It's such an outlandish universe too; some sort of history overview would have helped.

The novel's titular protagonist is Jean le Flambeur who alone gets to have a first person storyteller while other viewpoints are in third. Jean -- or rather, one of his gogols, an emulated mind -- is freed from a virtual prison by Mieli who needs the thief to pay off her debts.

Mieli is from the Oort Cloud which has been evidently colonized by Finns. Her name means mind and her highly advanced ship is Perhonen, butterfly. She uses few other Finnish words when describing her home, swear words too which felt kind of clumsy to me. Like if she wasn't really swearing, just dropping the words as fan service or something. It's weird to read a book from a Finnish American author written in English. I wonder if living in Anglophone countries has caused Rajaniemi to lose the naturalness in his Finnish.

Mieli doesn't need Jean in his current state but how he was. The thief has hidden his memories in a moving Martian city called The Oubliette whose society uses time as a currency. When one's time has been spent, they have to become a Quiet, a mute machine maintaining and protecting the city, until eventually getting put back into a human body. The Oubliette's citizens have a public exomemory that can be accessed by others anywhere in the city as long as they have the authorization level required.

Third viewpoint is a Martian detective Isidore Beautrelet who is hired to investigate Jean's arrival. While at that, his brilliant deduction skills help him to discover deeper secrets in the Oubliette society.

The Quantum Thief was a fairly entertaining read but it didn't at all scratch the same itch as The Three-Body Problem. I might still read its two sequels just for the sake of completeness.

Edited 2023-07-13: Added a mention of Isidore. Mieli's ship is called Perhonen, not Sydän (heart) who is her dead lover.