The Fractal Prince & The Causal Angel

Hannu Rajaniemi kept his heavy show-don't-tell style until the very end of his Quantum Thief trilogy. Only in the third novel I got a somewhat clear understanding of the factions and the recent history of the setting: how things came to be. The trilogy is certainly a wild ride all the way through. There's no stopping for strange words; you just keep reading and hope things will make sense at some point.

Moment-to-moment happenings remained rather intangible through the two sequels due to the metaphysical nature of the characters' posthuman state of being. While the protagonists, Jean le Flambeur and Mieli are bound to physical reality (Mieli more than Jean), their consciousness can overclock at will to sense and think at speeds far beyond human mind. And then there are the realms of the Zoku (which apparently is Japanese for clan) and other quantum-whatnots, including Jean's ship Leblanc, featured in the third book.

I guess I never noted in my post about the first novel -- and it's a pretty important detail -- that Jean le Flambeur is largely based on the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc (after whom Jean's ship is obviously named.)

The second novel, The Fractal Prince, takes its reader to Earth, which is ravaged by nanites or "wildcode" after the collapse that threw posthumanity into space. Jean and Mieli, working for Sobornost Founder Joséphine Pellegrini, plan to kidnap an early gogol of another Sobornost Founder. (The earlier generation a Sobornost gogol mind is, the higher its access and authority in the faction.) 

The Fractal Prince uses a lot of frame stories; it's intentionally reminiscent of The Arabian Nights. I'm not surprised Rajaniemi listed Douglas Hofstadter and his strange loops as one source of influence for the novel.

By happenstance I read the third novel, The Causal Angel, in Finnish (translated by Antti Autio). In Finnish, Mieli's Oortian/Finnish word usage doesn't stand out -- as is to be expected, I suppose. It is somewhat amusing to read a Finnish translation of an English novel from a Finnish author though.

After the rather apocalyptic events of the second novel, The Causal Angel is less frantic and takes time to explain things. Although it too is constantly building up for an equally explosive ending where the Sobornost and the Zoku clash on the orbit of Saturn.

The books' Zoku came from online gaming communities. Their MMORPG culture and all the references were kind of silly in The Quantum Thief already yet I wasn't expecting to see a Minecraft reference: one of the zokus in this one is called Notch and uses a guy with a pickaxe as their emblem.