The Quantum Thief - Terrible physics, great sci-fi

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Terrible physics, great sci-fi.

Initially, my inclination was to hate the book. My main problem is the self-importance that seems to exude from the book and the protagonist: the protagonist is “the one”, the cleverest, most intelligent, most charming, most handsome, bravest, etc…, rogue in the universe. It’s annoying because it’s a mix of the usual tropes of the Gentleman Thief and the Lovable Rogue, a bit like Robin Hood. The best parallel is almost every thief in RPG games and books, but this time in a pseudo-sci-fi setting. I call it pseudo sic-fi because it feels more like a fantasy setting, with warriors and wizards, using some physics-sounding names so that it’s not obvious that all this stuff is pure magic. This gets pretty annoying, because a lot of the stuff sounds like it should made sense, but it really doesn’t. For example, the author throws around the word “quantum” without any care for what it means, like when he mentions that there is a "quantum link” between two characters; it seems that you can safely replace “psychic” for “quantum” anywhere in book! And the use of the latest jargon does very little to mask what are obvious crappy sci-fi staples, like “nano-missiles” (“photon-thorpedoes”?), WIMP beacons, neutrino scanners, etc...

If you stop thinking of this less as sic-fi and more as fantasy, it gets less annoying; magic is magic, it doesn’t have to make sense. Once you get through that, you can see how great the book is. The story itself is not necessarily great - I am not sure I cared much for the plot, and certainly didn’t care for the main protagonist, the Thief (although I liked a lot the secondary protagonist, the Detective). However, the book presents an incredibly rich world, with new concepts that deconstruct and break all traditional sense of society and self.

Although terrible on physics, the book excels when it comes to things taking place in the realm of the mind: communication, augmentation, consciousness, resurrection, and tons of other features that go completely unexplained. There is a meshing of the physical and virtual world, like the Magic Leap augmented reality concept, but it seems to include not only vision and the other physical senses, but also memory and consciousness. It seems that it’s on all the time, and people can use virtual screens to hide or to keep private - and other people are obliged to comply with these virtual screens. People brains have been digitized, and their bodies (and brains) seem to be artificial. It all makes very little sense, but that’s ok; here the author is pushing the envelope, developing new ideas, and I think we can forgive him if he doesn’t know how something would work; the point is not the how, but what happens next, how things could be. Here he is creating something new and just beyond our understanding, offering us glimpses not only of the future, but of a fantastic new reality where things work very different from ours (like cavemen would see the our world). It is a truly revolutionary and evolutionary look into humanity’s possible future, and the highest caliber sci-fi.

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