The Quantum Thief

The Quantum Thief is the debut science fiction novel by the Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi, published in Britain by Gollancz in 2010 and in the United States by Tor in 2011. It is the first of three books about Jean le Flambeur, followed by The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel.

The novel is a heist story set several centuries in the future, in a solar system where cities walk across the surface of Mars, where privacy is managed through public-key encryption, where memory can be shared between people who agree to it, and where some of the most powerful inhabitants began as a guild in an online game. Jean, once a celebrated thief, starts the book in a prison designed to force its inmates to outwit themselves, and is extracted by Mieli, who serves a group called the Sobornost and needs him to steal something specific from a moving city.

Rajaniemi does not explain his vocabulary as he goes: the reader learns what a given term means from the way characters use it. The result is a book that has to be read as an immersion in a society with its own rules rather than as a tour of one.