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Douglas A. Anderson blogs about Lesser-Known Writers (mostly neglected fantasists) at desturmobed.blogspot.com.
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
London: Gollancz, 2010; £12.99 pb; 330 pages
reviewed by Jenny Blackford
Hannu Rajaniemi has produced an extraordinary first novel: a fast-paced, often funny, hard sf thriller about the adventures of an interplanetary gentleman-thief, Jean le Flambeur, on a thoroughly French far-future Mars. The Red Planet is well known for producing the best wine, chocolate, and cheese in the Solar System, and the male honorific appears to be Monsieur. Indeed, the book is permeated by references to French detective novels and film, particularly Jean-Pierre Melville’s early film noir, Bob le flambeur, and Maurice Leblanc’s well-known stories of gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin; there are explicit, important references to Leblanc’s Le Bouchon de cristal and “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late.”
When the book starts, Jean le Flambeur (“John the high-roller”) is an inmate of the Archon’s Dilemma Prison, a huge cube floating somewhere in space, where (so the theory goes) criminal minds are trained into cooperative behavior through continual iterations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. As Jean says, “a few million rounds more and I’ll be a Boy Scout.” He is unexpectedly rescued by a wild Oortian warrior-woman, Mieli, and her charming spidership, Perhonen. (Like the conscious, hyper-intelligent ships and devices in the work of Iain M. Banks, Perhonen is definitely a major character in her own right—and possibly the most lovable person in the book.)
None of the people in this brave new world inhabit ordinary human bodies as we know them: they are complex uploaded minds running on various strange substrates. “Human” bodies, if people have them at all, are built not born, and babies are created in an expensive technical process. Death is seldom final. Except for the neo-primitive warriors of the Oort, who pride themselves on being “singletons”, there can be, and often are, huge numbers of copies of any of these people, both serially and simultaneously. We even see the process on Mars where the “Resurrection Men” collect corpses and store their minds for rebirth. (It is no accident that Arsène Lupin was a master of disguise, who took dozens of different identities over the course of his fictional career.) When Jean is a little skeptical about his rescue from the Dilemma Prison, Mieli points out to him that “there are still several million of you in the Prison, so consider yourself lucky.”
Mieli is a thoroughly reluctant savior. She only rescues le Flambeur at the express command of the “goddess,” the “pellegrini,” who is hiding in her mind, and who has a strange task that she needs her old friend Jean to perform. Unfortunately, once Jean is inside Perhonen, it transpires that he has lost almost all of his useful memories of his spectacular past as an interplanetary thief; his first discovery is that he must go to Mars to gain them back before he can start the goddess’s work. Soon he deduces that he hid his memories from himself (as well as from others), decades earlier, in a huge and very deliberate scheme—and that he must outwit his fiendishly cunning past self if he is to find them again.
Quantum stuff is everywhere. Quantum computing is the least of it. Powerful strangelet bombs and q-dots—artificial atoms capable of assuming any range of physical properties—are among the quasi-magical devices that get the gentleman thief and his companions out of tight spots, though I have no doubt that Rajaniemi, whose PhD concerns string theory, has explored the possible science behind these inventions.
As the reader may suspect by now, it’s impossible to read The Quantum Thief without being struck by how much it’s like the work of Charles Stross—and it’s not a substandard version, either. Stross has been generous enough to supply a congratulatory front cover blurb: “Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am.”
Stross is right. I’m not sure that Rajaniemi is actually better than him, but he’s certainly extremely good. There can be little disagreement with the rest, especially about the similarities with Greg Egan. And it’s worth noting that Rajaniemi’s PhD means that the science in The Quantum Thief is as solid as Egan’s terrifying physics.
I’d like to add another candidate for comparison: Australian polymath Damien Broderick, now living in lovely San Antonio. Like much of Broderick’s body of science fiction, The Quantum Thief is full of multiple layers of gradually unfolding puzzles of often hellish difficulty. It’s also exuberantly playful with science, with language, and with sly references to old books and films. Again like much of Broderick’s work, the technology behind the events of The Quantum Thief (for example, the q-dots) follows Clarke’s law: it’s so far beyond ours that it operates a lot like magic. And the future solar system of the book is full of mysterious and powerful entities of unknowable motivations, and even their names have a fairytale air about them: Kings and Queens, Gods, Founders, Dragons, diamond worlds, the zoku colony, the Quick Ones on Venus, gogol pirates, the tzaddikim, and more.
(In theory, these characteristics that I’ve just listed might make one think of Gene Wolfe at least as much as Damien Broderick, but from sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter the book feels far more like Broderick’s manic, polymath playfulness than like Wolfe’s beautifully layered puzzle-boxes.)
But enough of the other authors who Hannu Rajaniemi writes like. It’s time to attempt the daunting task of describing the experience of reading The Quantum Thief.
The first time I tried to read the book, I got about 60 pages through before I stopped, bewildered by a succession of wrenches from full-immersion point-of-view to point-of-view in a series of richly detailed far-future milieux, told with a flurry of invented or totally repurposed words (gevulot, warmind, Sobornost, guberniya . . .). The reader starts in Jean’s slippery, allusive brain, as he explains the bizarre inner workings of the glass-walled Dilemma Prison, then we move into Mieli’s mind: “In the dream, Mieli is eating a peach, on Venus.” Mieli is luxuriating with her lover Sydän “in a q-dot bubble fourteen clicks above the Cleopatra Crater. . . . The amber light of the cloud cover filtering through the adamantine pseudomatter shell makes Sydän’s skin run copper.” That’s not too difficult—the prose is a little dense, but rather lovely—but the banter between Mieli and Sydän is trickier. For example, the first sentence of the conversation, “‘You bastard’, she says, breathing heavily,” seems to be intentionally misleading: it turns out to be a compliment from Mieli to her (female) lover on her sexual skills.
The episode on Venus is not real-time, but a memory given to Mieli by the goddess/pellegrini to keep her sane in the Prison, and Mieli is joltingly dragged out of it to rescue Jean. This rescue is described in what are apparently rather nice metaphors for hijinks on a quantum computing level: “Mieli spits the peach-stone at the glass wall. It shatters like ice. . . . Mieli holds the dead thief in her arms: he weighs nothing. The pellegrini is flowing into the Prison from the peach-stone, like a heat-ripple.” Next there’s a Delany-esque poetic passage of several fragments from Jean’s past lives—e.g., “The god of thieves hides inside thinking dust threaded together by quantum entanglements. He tells the diamond mind lies until it believes he is one of its thoughts and lets him in.” Then, we are back in Jean’s remade mind, in the new body built for him by the pellegrini, on the ship Perhonen.
By page 32, just as we are starting to feel tentatively comfortable at shifting among the POVs of Jean, Mieli, Perhonen, and even, for a few paragraphs, the voice of the intelligent Prison, the reader is thrust into the mind of young detective Isidore on Mars, trying to deduce who murdered a chocolatier in a chocolate factory. Isidore turns out to be the sweetest character in the book (except, possibly, for the lovable spaceship Perhonen)—but the reader has to absorb so much about this new milieu, including even more new terminology, that it takes a few pages time before Isidore has a chance to charm the reader into wanting to know more about him, and caring what happens to him. Then there is an “Interlude” in the POV of the King of Mars, at some unspecified
time, before we are back in Jean’s mind, now on Mars with Mieli—all by page 60.
None of these POV changes is made particularly easy for the reader. Like Broderick, Rajaniemi apparently delights in making each new character and situation as exotic and interesting as possible—and therefore making the text a touch challenging. But—as in Broderick’s work—if you persevere, there are wonderful payoffs.
One tip: Rajaniemi frequently follows a pattern of using a new word two or three times with no explanation, then providing a nice, clear definition on the third or fourth usage. Just read on, then double back. Also, you’ll find that most of the simpler puzzles are explicitly unraveled a few chapters after they are set for the reader—though with puzzle laid upon puzzle, it can be hard to keep them straight.
Jean is a captivating character; it’s hard not to like him. Isidore is even more appealing: smart and truly sweet. Other less-important characters are also excellent, notably Perhonen and the Gentleman. In theory, Mieli should be the most fascinating character in the book: a fierce, winged warrior from the exotic future-tribal Oort culture, carrying within her mind the goddess whom she worships and serves, but seldom happy with any course of action that the goddess proposes in her mind. But we learn too little about Mieli in The Quantum Thief. Her whole motivation is that the goddess has promised to reunite her with her lost love Sydän, but we don’t learn enough about Sydän—not even how she was lost—to care whether Mieli ever gets her back. I hope that the sequel, The Fractal Prince, fills in this gap
The final chapter closes a few earlier mysteries, but opens up huge new ones. We have still not even discovered the nature of the task that the pellegrini needs Jean to perform for her; we’re nowhere near the end of the over-arching story. The cover of the Gollancz edition that I was sent to review bears no indication that it’s anything other than a stand-alone novel, but The Fractal Prince has recently been released, and another book is planned to round off a trilogy.
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Jenny Blackford lives in sunny Newcastle, NSW, a little north of Sydney.
New Tales of the Yellow Sign by Robin D. Laws
Alexandria, Virgina: Atomic Overmind Press, 2012; $16.95 tpb; 176 pages
reviewed by Lisa Padol
When NYRSF asked me to write a review, we discussed several options. I came to the conclusion that, for quicker results, I should do a simple review of Robin Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign rather than a review of the new edition of the roleplaying supplement Masks of Nyarlathotep, which, to do justice, would have to survey nearly 40 years of gaming history. After all, New Tales of the Yellow Sign doesn’t require much of a backwards look, right? Oh . . . wait. . . .
New Tales of the Yellow Sign is among other things, a response to Robert Chambers’s 1895 collection, The King in Yellow, which, in turn, owes at least a nod to Ambrose Bierce. Bierce coined the names “Hastur,” “Hali,” and “Carcosa” in his stories “Haïta the Shepherd” (1893) and “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (1891). In the former, Hastur is a god whom Haïta worships. In the latter, the ghost of Hoseib Alar Robardin walks among the ruins of the city of Carcosa, not realizing he and it are dead. Robardin recalls the philosophical musings of Hali. These two tales of Bierce feel vaguely Dunsanian, before Dunsany.
It was Chambers who made the names of Hastur, Carcosa, and Hali haunt the mind. Chambers created the concept of The King in Yellow, a play which enthralls anyone so foolish as to even glance into its script. In the play, Carcosa remains a city, but Hali becomes a lake. Camilla and Cassilda are characters in the play, along with a Stranger who cannot unmask because he wears no mask, a fact which terrifies the characters. The King in Yellow may or may not be Hastur, a figure of terror, the Living God into whose hands it is terrible to fall. And his emblem is the dreaded Yellow Sign.
Only four of the stories in The King in Yellow deal with or even mention the play. Four out of ten tales in a collection, no more, but they persist in a dreamlike mood with an oddly attractive nihilistic beauty. Chambers’s collection influenced other authors. One was Marion Zimmer Bradley, who took names—Hastur, Camilla, Cassilda, Hali, Carcosa—for her Darkover novels. Another was H. P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft made one reference to Hastur and the Yellow Sign in his fiction, a throwaway line in “Whisperer in Darkness.” There one might have expected it to languish, hardly as important to the Mythos he created as Cthulhu or the mi-go or Yog-Sothoth.
Perhaps they would have been forgotten without August Derleth, who (according to Robert Price’s The Hastur Cycle in 1993) thought that Lovecraft’s Mythos should be called the “Hastur Mythos.” Or perhaps not, for Lovecraft also referred to Hastur, the Yellow Sign, and Carcosa in his influential 1933 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” where fans of his work could learn of those authors who had influenced him.
Lovecraft encouraged authors who wanted to try their own hand at Mythos stories, one such being James Blish. His story “More Light” (1970) tells of Bill Atheling, a man who, as a boy, contacted Lovecraft to ask about the actual Necronomicon. Lovecraft, of course, told him that there was no such book, and that to try to create one would be as much of a mistake as Chambers’s attempt to create an actual King in Yellow play was. Atheling naturally demanded to see the thing, and the almost-complete manuscript for the play appears in the story. Blish’s version is an interesting, if hardly horrifyingly maddening, text. And, it became the more-or-less canonical version of the play.
At this point, a force extends the influence of The King in Yellow: roleplaying games. In 1981, Chaosium published a game called Call of Cthulhu, where players take on the role of investigators into Lovecraftian mysteries. How closely these scenarios stick to Lovecraft’s vision varies, of course. Some focus on parts of the mythos emphasized by other writers, and, inevitably, some focus on Hastur.
The Hastur scenarios include Kevin A. Ross’s “Tell Me Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?” (in The Great Old Ones, 1989), and this is where a version of Ross’s now-canonical design for the Yellow Sign first appeared. John Tynes created both gaming material and short fiction capturing the beauty of Carcosa, including King in Yellow in 1999. Oscar Rios wrote Ripples from Carcosa (2005), three scenarios set in different ages where the same people are reincarnated to fight Hastur again and again. The future scenario even includes the summary of a play that is the sequel to The King in Yellow.
Tim Wiseman’s Tatters of the King (2006) presents a massive campaign focusing on Hastur’s attempt to affect the world in the winters of 1928 and 1929. It captures the feel of surreal beauty and horror of Carcosa, and it creates a range of people with different, but believable, motives for worshipping the nihilistic Hastur. The campaign features an adaption of the play The King in Yellow, this one called The Stranger and the Queen. One scene will be perceived differently by everyone, and the Keeper (gamemaster) is given three different summaries of the scene. When I ran this, one of my players decided that his character would pay for a private performance (as the theater was shut down after the first performance of the play ended in a minor riot) to find out which version of the scene was the real one. After some internet surfing, I discovered that some truly dedicated soul had created a script of The Stranger and the Queen that included not one, not three, but eight different versions of the scene.
While Call of Cthulhu was the first of the roleplaying games created primarily to model Lovecraft’s (and fellow mythos talespinners’) works, it was not to be the last. Kenneth Hite wrote a game called Trail of Cthulhu, published by Pelgrane Press, using their “Gumshoe” rules system, which was created by Robin Laws. Laws in turn wrote a scenario for Trail of Cthulhu, “Repairer of Reputations,” based on the Robert Chambers story that introduced The King in Yellow.
And, several roleplaying publishers have Lovecraftian fiction lines. Chaosium published The Hastur Cycle (1993), collecting thirteen older tales with some connection (sometimes tenuous) to the Hastur/Carcosa mythos. Miskatonic River Press has just released A Season in
Carcosa. And, this past August, Atomic Overmind published Robin Laws’s New Tales of the Yellow Sign, with an introduction by Kenneth Hite; Kevin Ross’s version of the Yellow Sign adorns the spine and back cover. It’s a tight-knit world.
This, then, is the context for the collection.
The first story in the collection, “Full Bleed,” is probably my favorite. This is unsurprising, as it is the closest in feel to “Repairer of Reputations,” which is my favorite story in the original King in Yellow. The point of view character in “Repairer” is trying to ensure that he is not denied what he considers his rightful inheritance. The point-of-view character in “Full Bleed” is investigating signs of corruption by the book The King in Yellow. This sets the tone for the collection, as Laws riffs off Chambers, faithful to the spirit of the original collection, but making no attempt to imitate it slavishly.
The New York Review of Science Fiction Page 4