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coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY
First up: for many people, the joy of Rajaniemi's work is in figuring out his world from the passing references made. This thread will undoubtedly contain a lot of words towards that end, enough so that it's unreasonable to expect all of it to be spoilered. If you're the kind of person who likes to come to books fresh, consider just buying them now and returning to this thread at a later date.

Over in the Sci-Fi thread there's a new heartthrob: Hannu Rajaniemi. Two books into his first trilogy, his writing is solid, his plots are complex and his universe will knock you on your rear end. Set in the deep future, the inner solar system is ruled by the Sobornost, the innumerable software clones of seven people who are bent on uploading and enslaving every mind that's ever been. Against them is set our protagonist, a legendary thief born anew in his liberation from a digital prison.

As a warning, Rajaniemi does not suffer lazy readers gladly. What little straight-up exposition there is is well-placed and brief, and you're largely expected to figure things out on your own. Think Mieville, think Peter Watts. Many find this to be endearing, but there are equally many who won't be able to stand it. Personally, I consider The Quantum Thief to be fantastic, and The Fractal Prince to be some of the finest scifi I've read in a very, very long time. It's impressive just how different the setting manages to be without ever resorting to an infodump: there are plenty of traditional SF tropes recognizable here, like uploading, nanotech and AI, but they're much better integrated into the narrative than you'd expect. It actually feels like the story grew out of the setting, rather than the setting getting grafted onto the story.


The Books

The Quantum Thief


Amazon - 3.5 stars
Goodreads - 4 stars

Fresh from jail, Jean le Flambeur is off to recover his memories from the Oubliette, a Moving City of Mars. By means of nanite gevulot, every citizen possesses perfect privacy, but every citizen must also time-share their mind in order to keep their home alive. First framed as a simple heist, much greater things eventually come to pass.

The Fractal Prince


Goodreads - 4 stars
Amazon - 4.5 stars

Picking up a few weeks after The Quantum Thief, Jean heads to post-Collapse Earth, a wildcode wasteland overflowing with the minds of the dead. While the action is centred around The Shard, an oasis in which fiction is taboo and salvaged minds are traded to the gods for magic, through a whole pile of nonlinearity the universe is fleshed out, and we learn exactly what it is Jean is to steal and how he ended up locked up in the first place.

The Causal Angel



That's the causal angel, not the casual angel. Due out July 15th 2014. Here's the (terribly vague) synopsis, which is all we know right now:

quote:

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.

Guidance on spoilers: To avoid huge walls of black text, I think the best way to do this would be to stick setting spoilers in plain view, but redact plot spoilers. For example, saying that Sumanguru is a Founder of the Sobornost would be fine, but saying that in the Fractal Prince he's being impersonated by Jean wouldn't be.

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Feb 5, 2014

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coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

HUMAN FISH posted:

Sometimes 2+2 was 3 though (and a couple times 5), but I felt clever.

The one thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the ending sequence was that Chen's haven was basically a nuclear artillery shell. Did that get foreshadowed but I just missed it?

Also, how much scifi do you think you'd need to have read to appreciate TQT/TFP? Having gorged myself on it SF for ten years, I didn't really think about it until I tried to give TQT to a friend and the simulation stuff just brought them up short. She just couldn't keep up with which scenes were real and which were digital, and that killed it for her.

From the other thread:

PrBacterio posted:

Loving Life Partner posted:

So many buzzphrases and ideas, and a lot of them kinda stale by now.
Honestly though, I felt exactly the same way reading (what little I did of) Rajaniemi... except for the "but I can't stop reading it" part, but this thread/forum still seems to love him for some (inexplicable to me) reason :shrug:

The opening for TQT stopped me short the first time round. I find it kind of surprising that he chose to open with the prison, as on page 1 it requires a leap of faith on behalf of the reader to continue even though they're drowning in jargon and don't have a damned clue what's happening. By half-way through the book that's fine, as you've realised that Rajaniemi will explain things eventually, but at the very start it's jarring.

That could well have been the intention though. If you are willing to take it on faith that everything makes sense, then you're very likely to enjoy the rest of the book.

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Nov 25, 2012

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Loving Life Partner posted:

I tend to think of athar and spimescape as the evolution of wi-fi. It's explicitly described as a kind of "virtual reality", but I imagine more mundanely it's a link to digital networks and computational horsepower to do a variety of things, like interface with other minds, transmit data, investigate or run gogols, etc. Kinda like cloud computing.

My interpretation was that the atmosphere and landscape were loaded with nanites, and it's their distributed hardware that the gogols run on.


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.

Yeah, this was my interpretation too. It's definitely implied somewhere during the spire fight, but I can't remember where.

Also the villain's name is Le Roi while Jean is the Prince of Flowers in TFP.

Base Emitter posted:

Weren't they terraforming machines?

The Investigator's cases would make a great short story collection.

The Quiet are terraforming machines, I think the Phoboi were weapons developed for the revolution:

quote:

She looks at me with the same curious intensity she gave her lunchtime apple, and for a moment I wait for the bite. ‘A lot of people think that. But of course, we did have a horrible civil war first that unleashed self-replicating killing machines that undid the terraforming our slaver overlords managed to do before we killed them.’ She smiles. ‘But yes, there is a dream in there, somewhere.’

Rajaniemi, Hannu. The Quantum Thief (Kindle Locations 2385-2388). Orion.

Turin Turambar posted:

I think someone should make a glossary or some poo poo. Lots of terms

Primes, Founders, Gogols, Guberniya, Sobornost, Zoku, Jinn, Anu, etc etc

There's a partial one for TQT here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_terms_in_The_Quantum_Thief
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_characters_in_The_Quantum_Thief

When I go for my third read through I might try compiling a more comprehensive one.

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Nov 19, 2012

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Mr.48 posted:

I like Peter Watts, but I find most of Mieville's stuff to be self-absorbed wankery. Are these books more like the former or the latter?

Former. I compared him to Mieville because they have the same let-the-reader-figure-it-out approach, but Rajaniemi hasn't swallowed a dictionary like China has.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Loving Life Partner posted:

TFP:
I think The Spike, The Kaminari jewel, and the experiment that Jean gets captured by Chen during/after are all linked together. It probably kicked off the Protocol War. It has something to do with the disconnect between the Sobornost and the Zoku ideologically.

Should be interesting to see how it all ends up.

The Kaminari was the Zoku clan who were building things out of strings & spacetime. Either accidentally or as a side-effect, the Spike happened and destroyed Jupiter, and that prompted the Sobornost to go out to there and see what happened and how they did it. That caused the Protocol War, though the higher-generation gogols used the cover story of it being about

quote:

The Great Common Task requires the taming of physics, the eradication of the quantum filth, taking the dice from God’s hand, the creation of a new Universe with new rules, inside guberniyas, where all those who died can live again, turning away from the laws written down by a mad god. That’s what the Protocol War is about. Stopping the zoku from defiling that dream.

Anyway when the chens find out the Jewel has been captured they destroy the fleet that got it secret it away. The Sobornost Experiment is an attempt to repeat the Spike themselves, but to Matjek it doesn't matter as he's got the product - the Kamanari Jewel - already. Since the Jewel is called "the key to the Planck locks" and as the pelligrini wants it because it can "change the rules", I'm guessing it allows access to the computational substructure of the universe.

Thing is, only the innocent can use the Jewel, in that your wishes are only accepted if they improve "the happiness of the whole zoku". So Matjek can't use it, but it listens to Mieli at the end of TFP.


Also while reading the above I remembered this bit:

quote:

The old thing inside me wants to say yes. To be with the Prince of Stories again. But something pulls me back. Perhonen. A promise. I keep my promises. Whatever the serpent things are, I am something else. I remember reading a book in a cell. I remember a door opening. That’s when I was born, out of the crystal stopper. A creature made from La Bouchon de cristal, a boy from the desert and an old god.

So Jean isn't entirely Aun - he only picked that bit up in the opening scene of the TQT, when he's reading La Bouchon de cristal.

One thing I don't get though: How does the physical Kaminari Jewel get from chen's guberniya to the Perhonen?

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Base Emitter posted:

One thing's already clear from this thread - I need to carve out some time to reread both books and see what all I missed or misunderstood.

One thing confuses me about the Sobornost vs. zoku and quantum computing: the Sobornost generating artificial singularities on Venus in order to produce prodigious computational density on an evaporating event horizon. Near the Planck limit that process can't be described classically.

The Sobornost must have recorded the 'output' of the singularity and still have access to Sydan's information/gogol if Mieli is willing to serve Pelligrini to get her back.


Even modern lithography has to take into account quantum effects, so I think the Sobornost's problem is more with long-lived quantum states rather than quantum mechanics full stop.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Ok I just read both these books. They were good? I guess? But what the gently caress happened?

Clarity, people! If the reader doesn't receive your story, you haven't told it!

Not sure I agree with this. I'd claim that if your target reader can't deduce your story then you haven't told it.

Also there isn't much in the series that isn't laid out explicitly, but the explicit bits are usually a sentence long and appear some time after you first asked the relevant questions, so if you're a fast reader they're very easy to miss. Which plot points are you confused about?

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Dean of Swing posted:

Just finished The Quantum Thief. drat that was good. However I do have one question that I am too tired to go read over and answer myself. Who the hell is Le Roi, and what was the whole point of the whole Walking City/Panopticon?

And one more thing: What the hell did that gun do? The 9 chamber one.

The Walking Cities were prisons, and used their convict labour to slowly terraform Mars. Le Roi was a copy of Jean that was incarcerated before the singularity, and who later helped subvert the gevulot and stage a prison break/revolution.

My memory's hazy about the gun though

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Sil posted:

First, where did the All-Defector come from? I know he was with them all along/was taken out of the Dilemma Prison as well, but where was he stored? In Jean?

Yeah, if you go back to the prison break out scene I'm pretty sure it's noted that there's a stowaway on Perhonen. The pelligrini then programmed the hunters to retrieve All-Defector rather than Jean, which is how it gets to be in front of Matjek.

quote:

Second, where did the Kaminari Jewel on Perhonen come from? The note at the end was a beautiful touch, btw.

This confuses me too. The only thing that I can come up with is that since Matjek's jewel is a fake, and since Jean has had no opportunity to steal it from him anywhere in the books, the switch must have been made before the series began. So I think that the real one is the plain old Zoku jewel Jean stole from the Martian collective, that he professes to cart around for sentimentality's sake.

coffeetable fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Jan 8, 2013

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Vaz posted:

Third book is due in early 2014 and titled as The Casual Angel. Also a new trilogy on way, starting with Summerland, due late 2014.

http://www.johnjarrold.co.uk/news/971/six-figure-world-rights-deal-for-hannu-rajaniemi/

:dance:

Causal Angel though. Time travel ahoy! And it's funny how the agent quotes himself in his own press release.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY
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.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

quote:

The old thing inside me wants to say yes. To be with the Prince of Stories again. But something pulls me back. Perhonen. A promise. I keep my promises. Whatever the serpent things are, I am something else. I remember reading a book in a cell. I remember a door opening. That’s when I was born, out of the crystal stopper. A creature made from La Bouchon de cristal, a boy from the desert and an old god.

Jean as we know him in the books is an amalgamation of a human and an Aun. The Flower Prince "hijacks" him as he's reading La Bouchon de cristal in the opening scene of TQT.

coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

n4 posted:

I finished TCA yesterday. I loved the trilogy, though I can't say I fully understood everything.

One question for now:

I understand what the dragons are, but I don't understand how they're a physical danger when they're unleashed on Earth. Did I miss something about the physical forms they take?
Earth is covered in abandoned nanomachinery.

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coffeetable
Feb 5, 2006

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GREAT BRITAIN WOULD BE IF IT WAS RULED BY THE MERCILESS JACKBOOT OF PRINCE CHARLES

YES I DO TALK TO PLANTS ACTUALLY

Dietrich posted:

When is it explained what Fedorovism means?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov

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