Sensational SF from a new global star in the genre.
Hannu Rajaniemi is from Finland and has a PhD in String Theory. He has lived, taught and worked in Edinburgh for the last seven years where he was a member of the high profile writing group that also included Hal Duncan and Alan Campbell.
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.
When Mieli, the winged Hunter and servant of a goddess, encounters quantum thief Jean de Flambeur for the second time, the thief is in the process of experimenting with Schrodinger's box for his current patron. Together the pair must travel to Earth on a mission intimately involved in the planet's future. At the same time, two sisters in the haunted city of Sirr, one of the last cities on a broken Earth, plan a revolution to free their city from the might of the Sobornost's virtual control of the solar system. Rajaniemi's sequel to The Quantum Thief blends the action-based story of de Flambeur, Mieli, and the sarcastic, sentient ship Perbonen with the slower-paced story arc of sisters Tawaddud and Dunyazad as they work and plot for social change and freedom. VERDICT Stories within stories, mind-boggling scientific extrapolations, and flamboyant characters mark the author as a rising star of the genre. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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