The Fractal Prince by Hanu Rajaniemi

[lightreads]

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


More post singularity thief nonsense in a wildly inventive future solar system.

Look, the thing is. I like a story that skips infodumps as much as the next girl. The prequel had that great setup where you could actually steal time off of someone's life, and this book does the same trick of plopping you down into a culture and never actually explaining the rules so it takes a few hundred pages to figure shit out. He makes it worthwhile, because these settings really are great. But at a certain point, it is incumbent upon an author to ensure that his readers . . . this is awkward . . . can actually figure out what the fuck happened. Because I am a sophisticated and experienced reader, I read this book over a short period of time, I rewound to check certain sections again . . . and I'm still not sure.

It's supposed to be all *gestures* there's this puzzle box, and getting into it destroys parts of what's inside. And the book is supposed to be like that. Parts of it are supposed to be impenetrable (unlike your typical caper, which turns on the eventual flourishing reveal). And that's fine. But I finished it feeling that, for all its vivid textures and beautiful set pieces, this book simply failed to execute on its end of the reader-writer contract. I am assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the key to the puzzle box is in the third book, but I'm frankly not convinced at this point that I want to bother.




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