The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I really think that selling on the strength of only a few thousand words for a rumored exorbitant amount of money is one of the worst things that can happen to a debut novel. Because let’s be honest here: nothing is that good.



Including this, a trippy and imaginative post human romp about a thief who can (and does) literally steal a moment of someone’s life away, and the detective chasing him. There is a lot of good stuff here, but it takes a while to come into play. Because seriously, when the opening gambits of your novel include a prison break from a cyber psychological hellhole and a space battle, and it’s kind of boring, you’re doin’ it wrong. No, the best parts of this novel are all in a Martian city which has evolved such complex cultural privacy norms that every person can edit themselves in and out of the memories of their loved ones. Pretty fucking cool, right there, and it gets only cooler at the halfway mark when it emerges there might be something wrong with the collective societal memory of little things like, um, the history of Mars.



Still, the world building was the coolest cat in town. Because the story is otherwise rushed, a little slapdash and clichéd on the interpersonal front (surprise relatives twist? really?) And it’s the opening of a trilogy in the irritating way where this was clearly all setup without a lot of weight or density of its own. And Rajaniemi squandered a lot of the great stuff he had on the board here about the creation of identity from memory on both the societal and personal levels, and how people and societies change as their memories are changed. It’s nifty keen shiny skiffy, but it’s not like we don’t all know something about untrustworthy cultural memories. I mean, what rich material! and yet it was all . . . inert.





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Black Sun Rising by C. S. Friedman

Black Sun Rising: The Coldfire Trilogy #1 by C.S. Friedman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Sorry, sorry, I know this is beloved of the hive mind, but after reading it, I’m kind of giving the hive mind a bit of the side-eye. Because not to judge – no, cancel that, no one will believe it anyway. I totally judge, and my judgment says obnoxiously purple prose, clumsy pacing, that kind of book that thinks it’s deep and morally ambiguous to write about evil people being forced to help out the white hats, when actually it’s just emo. Also, way to completely fail to use all the potential inherent in this notion of a planet whose energies respond to human emotion with everything from monsters to fast-tracked native evolution. Why couldn’t I have read about that, instead of this endless bland quest?



This gets better, right? Right?





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