"The good thing is, no one will ever die again. The bad thing is, everyone will want to." A physicist receives a mysterious paper. The ideas in it are far, far ahead of current thinking and quite, quite terrifying. In a city of "fast ones," shadow players, and jinni, two sisters contemplate a revolution. And on the edges of reality a thief, helped by a sardonic ship, is trying to break into a Schrdinger box for his patron. In the box is his freedom. Or not. Jean de Flambeur is back. And he's running out of time. In Hannu Rajaniemi's sparkling follow-up to the critically acclaimed international sensation The Quantum Thief, he returns to his awe-inspiring vision of the universe...and we discover what the future held for Earth.
Publishers Weekly,Rajaniemi's fun if sometimes torturously convoluted follow-up to 2011's The Quantum Thief returns to the adventures of Jean le Flambeur, posthuman master thief, still unable to remember much of his past and now forced to work for space captain Mieli and her goddess/debtor Josephine Pellegrini. On Earth, meanwhile, Tawaddud Gomelez schemes to advance her powerful father's political fortunes and put behind her a blemished past that includes a dalliance with a jinni. Rajaniemi plays with Arabian Nights references, from a character named Dunyazad, after Scheherazade's sister, to multilayered storytelling, but these elements never quite work alongside the hard postsingularity SF of Jean's story. The plot can get muddled as a result, but Rajaniemi's witty language ("On the day the Hunter comes for me, I am killing ghost cats from the Schrodinger Box") and charmingly wry hero will make the read well worth the effort for the first installment's fans. Agent: John Jarrold, John Jarrold Literary Agency. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.,Publishers Weekly,Publishers Weekly,Rajaniemi's fun if sometimes torturously convoluted follow-up to 2011's The Quantum Thief returns to the adventures of Jean le Flambeur, posthuman master thief, still unable to remember much of his past and now forced to work for space captain Mieli and her goddess/debtor Josephine Pellegrini. On Earth, meanwhile, Tawaddud Gomelez schemes to advance her powerful father's political fortunes and put behind her a blemished past that includes a dalliance with a jinni. Rajaniemi plays with Arabian Nights references, from a character named Dunyazad, after Scheherazade's sister, to multilayered storytelling, but these elements never quite work alongside the hard postsingularity SF of Jean's story. The plot can get muddled as a result, but Rajaniemi's witty language ("On the day the Hunter comes for me, I am killing ghost cats from the Schrodinger Box") and charmingly wry hero will make the read well worth the effort for the first installment's fans. Agent: John Jarrold, John Jarrold Literary Agency. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
