Book Review | The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi

Alone on a timeless beach, Josephine Pellegrini find herself disappointed by the end of the world.

The sun is almost down, an orange flare just beyond the edge of the calm expanse of the sea. The globe of Earth hangs in the sky. There are dark tendrils chasing each other in the white and blue, spreading like spilled ink. Matjek Chen's Dragons, turning matter and energy and information into themselves. Soon they will burrow into the crust of the dying world.

And when the world has died? Josephine will turn her attention to the tools that have failed her. To the traitorous Mieli and to the thief who betrayer her: Jean le Flambeur.

With his infectious love of storytelling in all its forms, his rich characterisation and his unrivalled grasp of thrillingly bizarre cutting-edge science, Hannu Rajaniemi has swiftly set a new benchmark for SF in the 21st century. He has told the story of the many lives, and minds, of the gentleman rogue Jean le Flambeur.

Influenced as much by the fin de siecle novels of Maurice le Blanc as he is by the greats of SF, Rajaniemi has woven intricate, warm capers through dazzling science, extraordinary visions of a wild future, and deep conjectures on the nature of reality and story. And now it's time to learn the final fates of Jean, Mieli and all mankind...

***

The finale of the stellar science fiction saga that The Quantum Thief kicked off begins days after the devastating denouement of The Fractal Prince, with Jean le Flambeur, the trilogy's fin de siecle frontman, finally free, if crestfallen after the abject failure of his latest caper. His partner in crime, meanwhile, finds herself in terrible peril, in part because of the last act of her sentient spidership Perhonen:

When a Sobornost hunter attacked us, the ship tried to save Mieli by shooting her into space. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. [...] The problem is that Mieli served the Sobornost for two decades and carries a Founder gogol in her head. There are too many forces in the system that was access to that kind of information, especially now. For example, the Great Game Zoku, the zoku intelligence arm. They might be nice about it, but when they find her, they are going to peel her mind open like an orange. The pellegrinis, the vasilevs, the hsien-kus or the chens will be less polite. Let alone the mercenary company she infiltrated and betrayed on Earth. (pp.10-11)

The Causal Angel is as daunting a novel as this early excerpt suggests, requiring from its readers such deliberate committment that those who come to their fiction for fun—though there is some—would be best to leave this baby be. Accessible it ain't, I'm afraid. What it is is brilliant: far more focused than the books before it, and as fulfilling, finally, as it is difficult.

Opinionated Speculations | The Curious Case of The Quantum Thief

Not so long ago at all, in a galaxy practically next door to our own, John DeNardo sparked off quite the conversation over at SF Signal with his review of The Quantum Thief. Before we get any deeper into this, check out the post in question - and be sure to stick around for the comments.

I'll wait.

...

So two stars from five.

Not to be utterly reductive, you understand, but that's the sole reason there's been this controversy. And in turn, that's the sole reason I've avoided any sort of scoring system here on The Speculative Scotsman. Because the numbers are essentially meaningless, to my mind: an arbitrary statement of how awesome, on a scale from 1-5 or hats out of ten or percentiles out of a hundred or whatever, a book has been. In your opinion. Your inescapably personal and utterly subjective opinion.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

What happened was, John DeNardo didn't really do The Quantum Thief justice. He admits that real life repeatedly intruded on the time he'd meant to spend reading Rajaniemi's debut, and of course that's fine; it happens. It will continue to happen until critics are locked away in sensory deprivation tanks for the duration of their respective reading experiences.

John acknowledges that. In his review he goes so far as to stress that "this [was] a reader fail, not necessarily a book one." He iterates the same opinion again in the comments. He saw in The Quantum Thief all the things other reviewers - myself included - have spoken of in such glowing terms: its grand-scale imagination, its very involved worldbuilding, its meticulous and addictive plot... and so on. Then he gave The Quantum Thief two stars from five.

Which isn't reader or writer fail, if you ask me. It's reviewer fail.

Two stars from five might seem a fair and representative review of John's reviewing in this instance, but of the book itself? I find myself hard pressed to sympathise. Because how is it in any sense reasonable to hold a text accountable for factors far without its purview? Does a dodgy cinema audience prone to juggling popcorn affect the quality of a good film? Should I take umbrage with a television show because the content of the ad breaks are inappropriate?

Of course not.

Now on the one hand, scored reviews are anathema to me in the first instance. At best they're short-cuts - easy outs for folks who can't be arsed to read the actual text of a given review; at worst, however, you can see in them the beginning of the end of bona fide criticism. Look at what happened to the video game industry in the wake of Metacritic and its ilk, sites founded entirely on the principle of aggregating all the aggregates to come up with one mega-aggregate to rule them all. These days, entire livelihoods often depend on developers achieving a certain aggregate threshold. Largely arbitrary scores are costing people their jobs, and all that follows.

So the numbers game bothers the bejesus out of me personally. Especially when the numbers in question seem so utterly at odds with the content of the review, as in the curious case of The Quantum Thief. On the other hand, however much I might differ from the following folks, I appreciate that there are those individuals and organisations to whom such scores matter a great deal. To each their own and all that.

But in both cases, the result of John's two-star review is a knock on The Quantum Thief. A knock, moreover, utterly unjustified; that's the heart of the matter here. Whether I believe these numbers hold any water or not, there needs to be some correlation between review and rating, surely, and an account of someone's personal circumstances does not an argument of the merits and demerits of a certain piece of entertainment make.

That said, SF Signal is an important resource to the community, and John DeNardo is usually a very fine reviewer. I'm not having a go at one or the other here. I simply don't think this sort of ill-conceived criticism should stand unchallenged, particularly given the ever-increasing prominence of certain score aggregators.

Because it can't be right to punish a book for your own shortcomings, can it?

Book Review: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

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Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

"Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy - from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to steal their thoughts, to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of the Moving Cities of Mars. Except that Jean made one mistake. Now he is condemned to play endless variations of a game-theoretic riddle in the vast virtual jail of the Axelrod Archons - the Dilemma Prison - against countless copies of himself. Jean's routine of death, defection and cooperation is upset by the arrival of Mieli and her spidership, Perhonen. She offers him a chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self - in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed..."

***

I've never been one for appendices. Laborious timelines, glossaries of characters and indexes of pivotal events - they've always felt like laziness to me; desperate forget-me-nots crafted by writers either incapable or unwilling to streamline pertinent information. I can understand the place of such things in, say, part six of some epic fantasy saga, but even then I'll give them the cold shoulder. I'm of the opinion that a book should communicate all necessary knowledge in the body of its narrative. More so, in fact, in the case of the aforementioned multi-volume tomes. For my money, an author should be accommodating, both of new readers and those who've waited a period of years for the next installment of their favourite series. If not - if the body of a book isn't approachable in itself - such appendices are little better than a trick to lure in easy prey and obfuscate that novel's oversight.

Tell you what, though: all my complaints aside, had there been some sort of index, I would have gladly (and repeatedly) referred to it during the mind-boggling first third of The Quantum Thief. Finnish debut author Hannu Rajaniemi does not condescend to explain much of anything in the opening act of his first novel. Nor, indeed, are convenient infodumps forthcoming in the remainder. There is a great swathe of races to get to know - Tzaddikim, Quiet, zoku and Sobornost - not to mention a wealth of initially baffling concepts to wrap your head around, from gevulots and spimescapes to Watches and agoras. The tomorrow's world of The Quantum Thief is one in motion from the get-go; its inexorable forward motion will fluster even the most grizzled veteran of hard science fiction, and there's hardly a chance to catch your breath.

We come upon Jean le Flambeur in the Dillemma prison, facing off against himself in an infinite iteration of game-theory. The titular thief comes a cropper, the bullet of his mirror-image opponent "an ice-cream headache, burrowing into my skull... and then things stop making sense." An apparent angel comes to his aid, spiriting Jean away to her sleek spidership, Perhonen, but Mieli (mind in Finnish) has only rescued the thief to imprison him once more. Before he can even begin to understand his latest captor, however, the ship comes under attack: the Archon guards want their prisoner back. But Jean, still quick on his toes despite his years of in the "diamond donut," eats the nanomissile lodged in Perhonon's sapphire skin - of course he does! - and all is well again.

Then there's the Tzaddikim detective, Isidore Beautrelet, whose indefatigable passion for solving mysteries makes him a tolerable curiosity to his zoku partner, Pixil - that is when she's not out on a raid astride her epic mount, Cyndra, "a plump, pink-haired elf." Isidore will have a vital part to play in the Mars-shattering events that Jean and Mieli set in motion. At the moment, however, he's up to his neck in chocolate: death by chocolate, to be precise.

The curious murder of a renowned chocolatier and Isidore's Columbo-esque unravelling of the otherworldly mechanics of it represent the first real opportunity for readers to come to grips with the various peoples and ideas of The Quantum Thief. Much of the action therein takes place on the Oubliette, a moving Martian city populated by settlers who must earn back their humanity as insect-like labourers, whereupon the currency for all things is time: a trip in a spidercab, a child to call your own or food from the fabbers costs so many megaseconds. And that isn't even the half of it. Rajaniemi has crafted a rich and far-flung futurescape full of insight and invention. He doesn't so much lay it out for us whole cloth as litter the lustrous landscape with clues for readers to draw inference from.

And appendices be damned, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

What begins as a sense of bafflement takes shape over the course of The Quantum Thief as a discovery waiting to be had, a mindfield of singular experiences yours for the taking. Interludes which seem appropos of nothing to begin with gradually enmesh with the two-pronged narrative the thief and the detective share; the world, the people, the ideas, all so utterly other at first, come together like the crystalline threads of Mieli's spidership during combat: once an expansive solar web, "the scattered modules pull themselves... along their tethers and fuse together into a tight, hard cone."

Coming from an author with a PhD in string theory, it's no surprise, I suppose, that The Quantum Thief is so intelligent as to appear intimidating, and though it takes a while to orient yourself to Rajaniemi's particular rhythm, his debut comes together piece by piece in the mode of M. John Harrison's Light - and it's every bit the equal of that modern-day genre masterpiece. Beneath the science, you see, beneath the staggering speculative wonder of it all, Hannu Rajaniemi has a knack for spare, no-nonsense storytelling that approaches the poetic at times. The Quantum Thief is a revelation, in the end, and make no mistake: we have here the sci-fi debut of 2010.

***

The Quantum Thief

by Hannu Rajaniemi

September 2010, Gollancz

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Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

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