A Couple Good Books

I finally got around to reading The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finnish writer living in the UK. I was lazy about it because people made it sound like it had a lot of difficult science in it and the author has a physics degree. It sounded daunting, although the short story I'd read by him, last year's award-winning “Elegy For A Young Elk,” was readable and more fantasyish in writing style.

The Quantum Thief was very readable after the first part, which was not difficult from the science but more from the writing style. I had trouble figuring out how the 'game' it involved worked. After that point, the book read a lot more like Steampunk with an alien planet setting. Very gadgety, clocks, capes, watches and all.

It earned the hype, mostly. (There was a lot of hype. I'm not sure this is the Great White Hope of hard science fiction.) I wasn't in awe of his story- and world-building powers by the end, like I often am with Alistair Reynolds for instance, but I enjoyed the read.

I'm not sure whether I want to follow the series – will have to see what the blurbs say about which characters it follows and whether the plots sound interesting. The characters in The Quantum Thief weren't very likeable, but that didn't matter for it as a standalone. It fit the plot.

The quantum physics part wasn't as integral and interesting as, say, in Spin State by Chris Moriarty, but the detective story angle of much of the plot kept things moving, with some pretty unexpected twists and turns.

Before that, I read Elizabeth Hand's sequel to Generation Loss, which I liked a lot despite how grim it got. The sequel, Available Dark, is equally death-obsessed and macabre, but not gratuitously. Death metal, vinyl collecting, and photography, what more could one want... except stark Norway and Iceland settings.

The protagonist, Cass, is a photographer and aging New York punk with a lingering habit. She has a believable enough mix of good and bad qualities to allow her to make the bad choices needed to get her into deep trouble, to provide jeopardy. I like her despite myself, since writing aging punk characters in SFF is like pandering to aging SFF-loving punx like me. The mystery plot also kept me guessing, and stayed surprising.

Now I'm on to The Businessman by Thomas Disch, which I took awhile to get to but have been plowing through quickly now that I started. His wit is truly wicked, and some of his language just hits the mark where something plainer, used to make the same observations, would not have the same effect.