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I just finished the Quantum Thief. Holy cow that was amazing. I had been on a Song of Ice & Fire kick and powered through every book over the summer and finished a week or two ago. I felt empty and came to this forum to be filled, and you guys did it for me. I've always loved this kind of sci-fi but had stopped seriously reading books sometime around 10 years ago and it's just been work and whatever else since then. But I've just found my love for books again, especially thanks to The Quantum Thief. The writing style is amazing, perfect even, the suspense is great and when you figure something out and it clicks you feel so satisfied along with that 'oooooh poo poo!' feeling because you realized who caused what or what is about to happen to whom. I immediately had to start The Fractal Prince after I finished The Quantum Thief. This might sound weird to people who haven't had similar experiences, but I think my experiments with psychedelic chemicals, specifically DMT and large doses of mushrooms, really helped me parse this book and visualize different things. I almost feel like the author has probably had some similar experiences. Often my trips would be thinking about quantum mechanics, the universe, alternate realities, personalities, and dimensions. And in a reallllly deep trip where you've achieved ego death you can kind of understand what it is like to be everything and understand everything and just be in tune with everything. It's a state-specific memory, I couldn't conjure it up now and certainly couldn't explain it well... but when you're in it you know. I've often thought about future people and what consciousness is and what a person or a human is, and this book just adds a lot more thoughts to be thought, while be entertaining as hell. I'm going on vacation next week so I'll probably finish the Fractal Prince in a few days of being on the beach, I'm looking forward to it greatly.
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Aug 23, 2013 15:26
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If you want consciousnesschat, pick up Blindsight. It's one of the highlights of modern SF and it's free on the author's website.
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Aug 23, 2013 15:54
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Oh jesus. Don't recommend Peter Watts without the following warning:quote:"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." —James Nicoll
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Aug 23, 2013 16:22
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Snuffman posted:That all said, I may be missing something obvious with the word "gevulot" in that its maybe a real word that I'm not aware of. Gene Wolfe hid a lot of stuff behind latin words.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:05
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quote:"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." —James Nicoll Seriously. He is fantastic, but so goddamn depressing.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:32
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Strange Matter posted:It's a hebrew word meaning "border". Tzaddik is also hebrew, but I cant' remember what it means. Righteous One, it refers to a people that are considered Just or Righteous in Jewish culture.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:49
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Finagle posted:Seriously. He is fantastic, but so goddamn depressing. Oh come on, the Ballad of Lenie Clarke is (eventually) uplifting and the orca story is hilarious.
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Sep 28, 2013 06:07
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Oh come on, the Ballad of Lenie Clarke is (eventually) uplifting and the orca story is hilarious. RELATIVELY uplifting, maybe. God that first book is just devastating to read.
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Sep 30, 2013 16:02
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Hallucinogenic Toreador posted:My take was that the king of Mars had always been a copy of Jean who had been imprisoned in Oubliette sometime after their experiences diverged. QFT SPOILERS That was made obvious multiple times. Jean copied himself constantly. The King of Mars was one of his old copies who still had his 'amoral thief' personality. He was trapped on Mars by his jailers. Mars was a prison planet (the name gave it away), but the prisoners rebelled and then used the Zoku tech to create a false history for it. He had to edit the memories of everyone to preserve the illusion. I loved The Quantun Thief. It hid its Sci-Fi tropes in easily understandable detectice archetypes - I loved Unruth as the reclusive millionaire with a secret. The language is poetic and gorgeous, and on the strength of TQF I want to put Hannu up there with China Mieville and M. John Harrison. The bit where you find out the Zoku is decended from Goonswarm is hilarious. I stared reading the original Lupin books after reading Quantum Thief. The one book I read, 'Arsene Lupin', did have lots about Lupin leaving a note before a crime and being a master of disguise. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Oct 10, 2013 |
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Oct 10, 2013 08:21
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Mr.48 posted:I'm glad I came in here and read this post because I just started TQT, and was about to return it to the store. Although I have to say that even if he does end up explaining everything, I think the over-abundance of weird future stuff is just bad form. We get it, you can make up really weird poo poo, now get on with the story please. I honestly just read Weird Fiction for the 'weird future stuff' or weird fantasy stuff. At its best its surreal poetry, and that'a what I need. Storing somebody's conciousness in chocolate crystal computers? That's genius. The only thing I didn't like was how Mieli turned every action scene she was into The matrix or a videogame. I randomly picked up M John Harrison's 'The Nova Swing' recently and it has a similar character and a seedy, poetic noir feel, but its less concerned with science (which I do prefer). As somebody who likes transhumanism, I was shocked a bit by how many physical things like paper were in The Quantum Thief.
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Oct 10, 2013 08:50
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Mieli is probably the part of the books I like the least because her motivation is stupid. Yeah, I'm sure your lover who willingly went to a singularity is going to be super pleased with you getting her consciousness out. I don't feel she adds a lot other than some stuff about the Oort cloud culture. I also hope you read Light before Nova Swing. I thought it was a much better book. I didn't care for the latter's tone.
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Oct 10, 2013 09:26
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Count Chocula posted:QFT SPOILERS One thing that struck me as confusing about mars was the timeline; how long ago had the prisoners taken control of the oubliette? The impression I came away with was that it was relatively remote, as otherwise everybody else in the system would just know the big secret. However the zoku tech needed to preserve the illusion hadn't been on mars that long, they fled there after the protocol war which iirc was only a couple decades before the books.
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Oct 10, 2013 11:40
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What's time when you're constantly uploading and changing bodies? Actually I was surprised how many people spent time in physical bodies.
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Oct 10, 2013 23:33
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Count Chocula posted:What's time when you're constantly uploading and changing bodies? Actually I was surprised how many people spent time in physical bodies. that's the problem though, oubliette citizens explicitly lead (multiple sequential) physical lives. Given that isidore is like 20 years old anyway and on his first lifetime, the zoku had to have been there longer than that at least or he would have non-exomemory recall of a time before there was any story of the revolution at all.
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Oct 11, 2013 00:36
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Or they could just gently caress with the exomemory. I think people trust most of their important events to the exomemory anyway. It's like if everything on the Internet confirmed one version of events. Would you trust your singular recall, or trust in what every other source has? And even non-exomemory memories are probably hacked, improved, or altered in some way - remember that the Martians use co-memories instead of some other form of messaging. That would all leave every memory vulnerable to tampering while in Quiet.
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Oct 11, 2013 01:04
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Count Chocula posted:Or they could just gently caress with the exomemory. I think people trust most of their important events to the exomemory anyway. It's like if everything on the Internet confirmed one version of events. Would you trust your singular recall, or trust in what every other source has? And even non-exomemory memories are probably hacked, improved, or altered in some way - remember that the Martians use co-memories instead of some other form of messaging. That would all leave every memory vulnerable to tampering while in Quiet. Isidore has never been in quiet and it's a critical plot point that non exomemory is inviolable before you run out of Time for the first time.
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Oct 11, 2013 02:15
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Count Chocula posted:What's time when you're constantly uploading and changing bodies? Actually I was surprised how many people spent time in physical bodies. Except for the Sobornost, I don't think this is a thing in that universe except for when the citizens of the Oubliette go into the Quiet (and even then, they just go from their body to a service body, then back). Jean is a huge anomaly due to his relationship with the Sobornost (specifically in the story, his not-really-a-body was given to him by the Pellegrini through Mieli. He was also in the Sobornost's system due, presumably, to his relationship with the Matjek). The Zoku, Oortians, and humans on Earth all seem to inhabit their original bodies.
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Oct 11, 2013 03:48
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Xenix posted:Except for the Sobornost, I don't think this is a thing in that universe except for when the citizens of the Oubliette go into the Quiet (and even then, they just go from their body to a service body, then back). Jean is a huge anomaly due to his relationship with the Sobornost (specifically in the story, his not-really-a-body was given to him by the Pellegrini through Mieli. He was also in the Sobornost's system due, presumably, to his relationship with the Matjek). The Zoku, Oortians, and humans on Earth all seem to inhabit their original bodies. Actually the zokus don't, they are arguably the most transhuman of all the factions as a human-derived quantum computational semi-group consciousness. They trade bodies all the time, one of pixil's friends becomes her WoW mount at one point. The zoku lan party was deliberately anachronistic.
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Oct 11, 2013 04:19
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andrew smash posted:Actually the zokus don't, they are arguably the most transhuman of all the factions as a human-derived quantum computational semi-group consciousness. They trade bodies all the time, one of pixil's friends becomes her WoW mount at one point. The zoku lan party was deliberately anachronistic. I saw that as more of an entanglement party thing. I thought they were generally themselves, but were always connected to a small to medium sized group.
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Oct 11, 2013 04:25
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 6 May 2014 blurb posted: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. And now with his third novel he completes the tale of his gentleman rogue, the many lives and minds of Jean de Flambeur. Influenced as much by the fin de siecle novels of Maurice leBlanc as he is by the greats of SF Rajaniemi weaves, intricate, warm capers through dazzling science, extraordinary visions of wild future and deep conjecture on the nature of reality and story. And now we find out what will happen to Jean, his employer Miele, the independently minded ship Perhonnen and the rest of a fractured and diverse humanity flung through the solar system. http://upcoming4.me/news/book-news/hannu-rajaniemi-the-casual-angel-cover-art-and-synopsis
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Oct 15, 2013 09:27
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edit: quote isnt edit 
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Oct 15, 2013 09:27
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Gwarsh. I'm excited to have a release date, but it's sooooo far away  At least I got Republic Of Thieves and a few other things to tide me over and get me there. But this is the book I'm waiting for most.
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Oct 15, 2013 12:57
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I was under the impression that perhonen bit it at the end of TFP. No?
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Oct 15, 2013 13:02
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A bunch of loving nerds setting themselves up as eternal god-kings with trillions upon trillions of slaves. This is the shittiest future I can imagine.Neurosis posted:The Aun implying they'd been around beforehand was because they are archetypes which are pervasive throughout humankind, but before they perished when any given human did. They pretty much straight out state that. They are THE MEMES made real by NANOMACHINES SON. Forgall fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 09:43
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Loving Life Partner posted:I know most times I read sci-fi, I'm bent on understanding and gorging myself on the details of the vision and technology. Yeah, I come from an Arts background, not a science one, and I enjoy these books on the level of poetry. Every chapter has a stunning opening sentence, and the fight sequences are pure cinema. I just finished The Fractal Prince. It was a trip reading it at the same time as Grant Morrison's Supergods, since one of Morrison's Big Ideas is the permeable barrier between stories and reality, the old 'as above, so below' thing. Stories take on the form of reality, and reality takes on the form of stories. And in his analysis of Watchmen, Morrison talks about how we instantly reread it once we realize that its actually Rorschach's journal - we turn the story into a loop. That all comes into play in The Fractal Prince! Not only the merging of 'story' and 'reality' (as if those terms have any real meaning), but TFP and TQT being their own self-loops. Every time there was a new revelation about a character's identity, I was flipping back and forth to earlier parts of the book, reinforcing the self-loop! It's genius. I tend to hold the Sobornost view: that death is the enemy. I thought it was a horrible tragedy when The Gourd and all the memories of old Earth were destroyed. have a few questions, though. Does the Sobornost include other minds, or are all their citizens just copied of the Founders? That would mean Sydan stopped existing. Where did The Aun come from? Are they pure memes?
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Dec 7, 2013 03:34
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Sobornost harvests gogols from everything they can get their hands on basically. It's unclear what if anything they do with those gogols though as the only agents of sobornost seen thus far aside from Jean and Mieli are members of copyclans.
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Dec 7, 2013 07:30
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Andrew Smash is correct. There might be some clues in the Engineer-of-Souls bit about what they do with them, but I can't remember. The Sobornost might be write in Fedorovism, and I can agree that the extinguishment of any sapience in this apparently bleak mechanistic universe is a great tragedy, but that says nothing to recommend what they see as the means of fighting death. And the Aun (I seem to repost this like once every couple of months): were probably made by Matjek Chen as a precocious child. He encoded them into whatever the internet equivalent was as permanent fixtures to preserve his imaginary friends.
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Dec 7, 2013 15:56
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andrew smash posted:Sobornost harvests gogols from everything they can get their hands on basically. It's unclear what if anything they do with those gogols though as the only agents of sobornost seen thus far aside from Jean and Mieli are members of copyclans. I actually re-read TQT just today and caught something for having read this question recently - the vasilevs on Mars deride Mieli as a 'singleton member of a non-founder Clan', so they apparently do sometimes follow through on their promises of providing a Realm for services rendered in furtherance of the Great Common Task. They also say that Isidore might serve as a missile guidance system, and Mieli seconds tasks to gogols left right and center, so i think a larger portion of them are being lobotomized by the Engineer of Souls and pressed into service.
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Dec 8, 2013 03:38
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Ceebees posted:I actually re-read TQT just today and caught something for having read this question recently - the vasilevs on Mars deride Mieli as a 'singleton member of a non-founder Clan', so they apparently do sometimes follow through on their promises of providing a Realm for services rendered in furtherance of the Great Common Task. Interesting that you read it that way, I just assumed they were insulting her.
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Dec 8, 2013 06:57
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andrew smash posted:Interesting that you read it that way, I just assumed they were insulting her. Well, it is still an insult; a singleton is vulnerable to true Death and is probably about the worst thing a Founder copymember can think of being, and the fact that they call her a non-founder suggests to me that that's a thing. On top of which, Mieli's pelligrini talks of her other servants, and Jean's memories include being both Gogol and copyfamily. In short, I don't think that even the Founders are infinite bastards enough to build a billion heavens and keep every single one for themselves.
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Dec 8, 2013 08:58
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andrew smash posted:Sobornost harvests gogols from everything they can get their hands on basically. It's unclear what if anything they do with those gogols though as the only agents of sobornost seen thus far aside from Jean and Mieli are members of copyclans. The chens and the Engineer both make reference on a couple occasions to a subsidiary function of the guberniyas being maintenance of afterlives for a vast pile of surplus non-Founder gogols, and given that the Sobornost's entire philosophical reason for existing (and why they contributed to the Collapse) is to end death, I see no reason to doubt this. In point of fact, given the tendency for Matjek Chen's designs to wander off from their original intentions, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the guberniya brains actually are primarily devoted to afterlife-generation. Certainly the vasilevs and hsien-kus strongly imply that they believe in the official story of the Sobornost's goals. Edit: quote:And now with his third novel he completes the tale of his gentleman rogue, the many lives and minds of Jean de Flambeur. quote:completes Chen drat you, Rajaniemi! I wanted another book, but not like this! 
Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 23:27
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The goal of the guberniyas is to acquire enough information about everyone that has ever lived to allow for all of them to be simulated within one brain world or another. That's how Chen wants to defeat death.
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Dec 16, 2013 08:42
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Sil posted:The goal of the guberniyas is to acquire enough information about everyone that has ever lived to allow for all of them to be simulated within one brain world or another. That's how Chen wants to defeat death. Well. Mostly. Chen gets talking about how the most important modern function of the guberniyas is to confine the Dragons, but bear in mind that this is while he's intending to straight up hack the universe so that he doesn't need to simulate everything to defeat death. The other Founders aren't really in on that part of the plan. Except for the ones who are and/or the ones who've worked out Chen's latest crazy scheme.
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Dec 16, 2013 22:31
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Just started rereading these. TQT flies by really fast. It's not long, sure, but the action is also quite fast paced and the prose is goddamned gorgeous. Now that I'm familiar with the nomenclature it's mostly easier but it only reveals the stranger stuff more prominently. The things I have picked up and wondered about so far: * Early memories talk of a young boy going to something just outside solar panel farms - a soldier approaches him. Am I forgetting something about that? * The Jean we have remembers his pre-Trickster days... And his name pre-Trickster. He calls to the little boy who was a projection with what I assume is his first name. One time when he is talking to Mieli he says his better sense determines that he do X, but the Trickster in him tells him to do Y. Suggests there is a significant percentage of both still going on. I am not really surprised, I do recall the prisoner being possessed by the Trickster while reading a book in prison. I'm just happy to see there's a bit of the original guy. I'm hoping it's the dude who used to go drinking with the Founders, pre-Trickster. * I am curious why the zoku elder found 'justice' so disgusting. I understand the idea of progression might be antithetical to the notion of everyone having just deserts... But disgusting? Especially given another elder still wondered about levelling up? Strange. I am really looking forward to finding out more about the zoku. The most human setting we have seen so far is the Oubliette and they are still kind of alien and strange. I cannot imagine the zoku will be any different. Also, space battles. The one in TFP loving ruled.
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Jan 25, 2014 19:06
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Neurosis posted:
They see everything as a game, so people who unironically care about things disgust them.
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Jan 25, 2014 21:03
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Forgall posted:Not sure why this needs to be spoilered, but just in case Okay, I could take quantum nerds, but space hipsters crosses a line.
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Jan 26, 2014 17:01
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Ceebees posted:Okay, I could take quantum nerds, but space hipsters crosses a line. it's not hipsterism. the zoku on mars has a philosophical commitment to the idea of competition in gaming being their primary motivator. the idea of a separate concept with intrinsic worth being pursued for its own sake rather than as a self imposed manner of measuring one's skill at a particular challenge is antithetical to their world view. irony doesn't have anything to do with it. I say the zoku on mars because that's the only one we know in any depth. there's some indication in the fractal prince that other zokus, while still quantum filth as the sobornost put it, are organized along different principles and presumably arose from different groupings of people than gaming clans.
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Jan 26, 2014 17:18
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Soon we will know everyone left in Sol is an alien monster. The Fedorovists, gogol pirates, the conquered oubliette, the dragons released by the Sobornost, the Gun Club zoku, the Oubliette zoku, the Evangelion zoku, the Akira zoku. Know horror.
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Jan 26, 2014 21:00
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Count Chocula posted:
I thought that particular zoku was a WoW guild. That said I wouldn't be surprised if Rajaniemi has spent time playing Eve, the game has a pretty significant Finnish presence and they were part of a (terrible) group called "KenZoku" at one point, which the Eve Goons murdered pretty hard. I just finished TFP, and I have to say the two books were just plain refreshing. His stuff is ferociously imaginative compared to the bored tropes you get bombarded with these days. I loved the grim feel of the universe, the whole solar system is basically a war torn environmental disaster area where you're probably going to get your brain stolen. The Sobornost is actively seeking the destruction of the universe and the zoku accidentally almost did it with the Spike. TFP answered my biggest burning question, which was what is The Great Common Task. The milleniaire's description of it in TQT seemed hauntingly abstract at the time ("Maybe the Sobornost has won, Fedorov's dreams are true and we are all memories"), I had no idea how literal it could be 
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Jan 30, 2014 22:06
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Red Crown posted:TFP answered my biggest burning question, which was what is The Great Common Task. The milleniaire's description of it in TQT seemed hauntingly abstract at the time ("Maybe the Sobornost has won, Fedorov's dreams are true and we are all memories"), I had no idea how literal it could be
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Jan 30, 2014 22:23
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