The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi (4 stars)

Matter: what kinds of heaps its piled up in makes no difference, he said, when she asked if Sirr pleased him.

Indeed, scoffing at the physical world, and disdainful of meatspace, Rajaniemi's post-singularity caper continues. Of course if you don't like how matter is piled up, having knowledge of some secret names will let you reshape this wildcode desert:

The Names are the names of the Aun, and by calling them you control the world, access the functionality built into the foglets in Earth's atmosphere, rock and water by the ancients.

Rajaniemi evokes Arabian Nights and biblical parables with passages like 'The Story of the Wirer Boy and the Jannah of the Cannon':

Before the cry of Wrath rattled the Earth and Sobornost sank its claws into its soil, there lived a young man in the city of Sirr. He was a wirer's son, with a back and chest burnt brown by the sun, nimble in his trade; but when the night fell he would go to taverns and listen to the tales of the mutalibun - the treasure-hunters. Eyes aglow, he sighed and listened and breathed in the stories of hissing sands and rukh ships and the dark deeds that greed summons out of the hears of men.

I've waited too long to write this review, but the overall vibe I got from this book is that it was designed to fill in the world in preparation for a grand finale. Rajaniemi adds more complexity and character to the world created in the Quantum Thief: there are interesting plot reveals, some twists, and we get to know Jean and Mieli better. But I was mostly left with a feeling of anticipation. I also found myself less interested in this desert being mined for gogols than the complex society of the Oubliette.

I await the next installment eagerly.

Oh, I can fake social niceties perfectly well, but it is just slave gogols moving my face, you understand. My emotions are outsourced. My private utility functions and pleasures are...quite different from yours.

4 stars

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (4.5 stars)

Picking up The Quantum Thief reminded me a lot of the first time I read A Clockwork Orange, where there is so much unexplained slang that at first it seems barely comprehensible. But it's amazing how quickly you can pick up concepts from context, and pretty soon I was all over gevulot, exomemory, the quiet, gogols, and much more. As an aside, while Burgess drew heavily on Russian, Rajaniemi pulls words from Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and there is a glossary if you get stuck. I was rather surprised to encounter the word Yggdrasil again, having just read it in the Hyperion series.

While I'm on comparisons, don't expect any exposition. On a scale from Ready Player One to Neuromancer, it's jammed right up at the Neuromancer end. It is disorienting, confusing, challenging and awesome. This is definitely a book that benefits from being read in large chunks. I was nibbling at it and had to constantly backtrack a few pages to pick up the story again.

I have to admit to mostly ignoring the physics, I'm sure the references are exciting for quantum physicists, but I'm not particularly interested in constantly running to Google while I'm reading fiction. But there are plenty of other things to focus on, Rajaniemi has packed so many innovative ideas into the novel it's like he has been bottling them up for decades and had to get them all out in this debut novel.

I particularly liked gevulot, this idea of crypto-backed privacy where, even during ordinary conversations, people exchange contracts with each other to govern how the other party sees you and how much of the conversation they are allowed to remember, made possible since all memory is stored in the city-wide exomemory.

Even though the park is an open space, it is not an agora, and walking down the sandy pathways, they pass several gevulot-obscured people, their privacy fog shimmering...

Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it - and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop.

All residents of the Oubliette, the walking Martian city where the novel is set (!), are required to serve time as 'Quiet' where their virtual reality personality (gogol) is transferred into a machine and used in service to the city. As a result, time as a regular citizen becomes currency, there's a vaguely described but sinister threat outside the city, high-tech superheroes come-police, posthuman warrior clans descended from MMORPG clans, and a powerful collective with a universal proletarian Great Common Task. Not to mention a modern day Sherlock holmes and a heist. Like I said, lots of great ideas.

So what's not to like? There's a point towards the end of the novel where the artful sequence of plot reveals steps out of mazes and shadows into an action-packed climax. This transition felt a little clumsy to me, and seemed fairly shallow after the mysterious build-up. The "Luke, I am your father" (and this is your mother and we're one exciting family) moment should have been cut entirely. Compared to the clever reveals earlier in the novel it was clumsy and cheesy.

4.5 stars