The Quantum Thief by Hannu RajaniemiMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
OK. For those of you paying attention at home, this is something like my 8th book review today. That's what happens when you go on vacation and read a bunch of books and delay until the holiday weekend to review them all, so here goes.
I liked this book, I even really liked this book, at least enough to get it over the hump from 3 to 4 stars. I really wish this book had been better.
This book has a great setting, and interesting plot, and reasonably well developed characters. This book also has some fantastically epic scenes and a couple of terrific plot twists/ big reveals. Unfortunately, in order to get to this you have to wade through about a million new vocabulary words*, visual descriptions that read like their blocking out the CGI for inevitable film adaptation**, some decidedly non-intuitive physics, and an Altered Carbon like representation of digitized resurrection that is never satisfactorily explained.
I also thought the Zoku were kind of dumb, but that's a minor quibble.
In many senses, the book was just too short. If the author had had 300 more pages to explain what the fuck was going on, the big reveals would have been bigger, the plot twists would have been twistier, the heroes would have been even more heroic, well, you get the picture.
Damned if I can't wait for the sequel though.
* http://xkcd.com/483/ I might actually read Anathem next...
** The inevitability of the film adaptation is soley in the author's imagination, I'm pretty sure.
