The Quantum Thief is that rarest of rare birds; a first novel by a debut author which is a joy to read and helps take the science fiction genre in which it sits forward. If, like me, you believe the ultimate aim of science fiction is to question and challenge what it means to be human — and ultimately, to reaffirm your belief in humanity in general — pick this book up immediately.

The speculative fiction scene has had a lot of ‘false starts’ over the past few years — debut novels proclaimed to be the next big thing, which turned out to be disappointed and immature efforts. The Quantum Thief is not one of those. Like Patrick Rothfuss‘ stellar 2007 effort, The Name of the Wind, Rajaniemi’s novel is the real thing.

If you read the synopsis of the Quantum Thief on its back cover, you would probably believe the book is something of a heist story, but set in a post-human Solar System. The book’s description ticks all of the right boxes for a novel which sits squarely in the emerging singularity sub-genre of science fiction.

Its protagonist, Jean Le Flambeur, is described as a “post-human criminal”, a mysterious thief who can steal into something called, with echoes of artificial intelligence, the “vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System”, and nicking rare Earth antiques from “the aristocrats of the Moving Cities of Mars”.

Throw in a little philosophy to boot — the book’s jacket mentions the popular ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ problem much-debated in game theory over the past half-century — and the archetypal deadly femme fatalle — dubbed ‘Miele’ — and you have a book which could, going by its synopsis, be described as a stereotype of the singularity niche.

However, as soon as you start actually reading The Quantum Thief, you realise that it is not these superficial melting pot elements which makes book something special; it is the way that — like masters such as William Gibson and Iain M. Banks before him — Rajaniemi constantly displays and explains the phenomenal world he conjurs for the reader, even while his protagonists are moving through it and changing it as they go.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the author’s concept of how human privacy is safeguarded, and — when one desires it — breached — in the post-human society of the Oubliette in one of the moving cities of Mars where most of the plot of the book takes place.

Imagine if the granular privacy controls of the currently popular social networking site Facebook could be extended to our everyday existence. Imagine if you could choose who sees your face as you walk down the street — or even if you could control if your housemates knew when you were home. If you could hide every aspect of everything that you are and do — with a thought.

And imagine, simultaneously, if you could also selectively breach your cloud of total privacy protection to share whatever information you wanted to, with whoever you wanted. A memory, your name, your place of work, other selected personal details.

Such a world would be intensely personal — and yet meaningful. Information flows chaotically and dramatically around us in our year of 2010 — out of our control and with constantly damaging effects. But in Rajaniemi’s world, it can be controlled — by every individual.

The Quantum Thief is not truly a heist story. Instead, it is more or less a detective novel.

And Rajaniemi employs his striking Gevulot concept — as well as many other nimble futuristic human thought combinations and permutations to the greatest of effect within this structure. So many of the tropes that you might find in an Agatha Christie suspense mystery are here — but inverted, turned on themselves by the fact of human evolution and post-singularity technology that change them, while still maintaining much of their original shape.

The writing in The Quantum Thief is similarly skilled.

Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Rajaniemi displays somewhat of a light touch with his prose. The reader is never forced into any emotional situation or pushed around intellectually. Instead, the author invites his audience’s mind to gradually comprehend the world and characters he has created. He leads you through the book with one hand, walking backwards, coaxing you onwards.

Then, just when you have understood the implications of a plot event, Rajaniemi shows you that the track goes still deeper.

I don’t want to write too much more about this book; it’s a short one, with the copy I had sent to me by the book’s Australian publisher, Hachette, only clocking in at 330 pages of quite large type. But what I do want those who enjoy science fiction to do is put The Quantum Thief on their list immediately.

It is commonly said that the job of science fiction author is to take one technology or scientific concept present in modern day society forward into the future — extrapolating it to its eventual outcome and then positioning protagonists in that altered world.

Yet too few modern science fiction authors do that.

It’s not enough — in 2010 — to extrapolate what the future implications of the atomic bomb, the electricity network or the discovery of black holes might have on the future of humanity. That was the role of authors in the 1970′s, and they did that well.

Today’s readers want to see the future of concepts introduced by the Internet, by Facebook and Twitter, by the iPhone and the personal storage system embodied by Gmail. They want to see how the iPad will change the way humanity functions as a species in millennia to come. Over the past decade we’ve had authors like Charles Stross and Iain M. Banks to do this for us. Now, let us add the name of Hannu Rajaniemi to that list.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about this remarkable effort for a first novel is not that it is so good. It is that it sets high expectations for what else we can look forward to from the master to come.

Charles Stross

British sci-fi author Charles Stross has confessed that he has long hated the Star Trek franchise for its relegation of technology as irrelevant to plot and character development, as well as similar shows like Babylon Five.

On his blog Stross writes:

“I have a confession to make: I hate Star Trek. Let me clarify: when I was young — I’m dating myself here — I quite liked the original TV series. But when the movie-length trailer for ST:TNG first aired in the UK in the late eighties? It was hate on first sight. And since then, it’s also been hate on sight between me and just about every space operatic show on television. ST:Voyager and whatever the space station opera; check. Babylon Five? Ditto. Battlestar Galactica? Didn’t even bother turning on the TV. I hate them all.”

The problem, according to Stross, is that as Battlestar Galactica creator Ron Moore has described in a recent speech, the writers of Star Trek would simply “insert” technology or science into the script whenever needed, without any real regard to its significance.

Stross argues that the writers of Star Trek and its compatriots have “thrown away the key tool” that makes science fiction interesting and useful in the first place”.

Stross is perhaps best known for his sci-fi novels Accelerando, Glasshouse, Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise and Saturn’s Children, all of which earned him nominations for the genre’s biggest accolade, the Hugo Award. However he also has a bigger bibliography; for example half a dozen books in the Merchant Prince series in which humans have an ability to travel between parallel versions of Earth, which all have a different level of technology.

He is known for frequently expressing his strong opinions on his blog; for example in late August he used it to launch an attack on American political culture, describing it as bereft of mercy and suffering from a taint across every area of public discussion.

Commentary
I wholeheartedly agree with Stross (with one caveat). The Star Trek, Stargate, Star-whatever series have been ignoring the true science and technology at the heart of their created universes for decades. The aliens are human-like, the technology is mostly just a metaphor for tools and materials we had several centuries ago, and the shows have certainly not gone far enough to examine its impact on our humanity.

This is something that sci-fi writers have always done extremely well. Perhaps the best examples I can think of right now (it’s 6:13AM in the morning!) come from the books of Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein’s gender-bending, age-bending, Martian-bending books have done much to show us how changing our level of technology would go far to changing the way we think, and by proxy, who we are as a species. Can anyone truly say they came away from Stranger in a Strange Land not the least bit discomfited?

Stross’s books themselves do much to address the problems he is complaining about. To take one example, in Accelerando I remember one of the main characters, Manfred Macx, had lost his glasses – and temporarily had much of his personality removed due to the fact that they are also the storage device for much of his mind due to the ongoing integration of human consciousness with the online digital environment.

It’s a lot different than having Wikipedia on your iPhone.

However I will call Stross up on one area. He appears to have missed the point about why Moore was telling that story in his speech about the poor speechwriting practices in Star Trek.

In Battlestar Galactica, Moore attacked exactly that problem that you’re complaining about, Charles, as a direct attempt to reform the stale sci-fi genre. The show is worth watching precisely because it is a glorious and award-winning contemplation of the relationship between man and machine. It’s spectacular, and I commend it to you.

You simply cannot put Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek in the same box. If you do, you’re missing probably the greatest sci-fi masterpiece in the televisual medium for the past decade.

Charles Stross

British science fiction author Charles Stross has published an extraordinary attack on American political culture on his blog, describing it as bereft of mercy and suffering from a taint across every area of public discussion.

Using the examples of the protests of the USA administration about the release from Scottish prison of terrorist Abdelbaset Al Megrahi on compassionate grounds because of his terminal cancer, and the ongoing debate about healthcare reform, Stross attacked the entire American political establishment in a blog entry posted yesterday:

There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.

In a side note, Stross tells members of the far-right British Nationalist Party to just “fuck off right now”, noting there are “some folks I can do without”.

It’s not the first time that Stross has aired his political views in public; just days ago the author wrote a lengthy piece about privacy issues surrounding the United Kingdom’s National DNA Database, describing one of the practices around it as “merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy”.

Interestingly, sci-fi blog io9 directly questioned Stross in January 2008 on the topic of when science fiction itself becomes a form of political intervention.

Stross answered that fiction is usually used as an entertainment medium; as such, political fiction is “at its best precisely when it doesn’t preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.”

Commentary
Sorry Charles, but I’m going to call bullshit on this one. You’re way out of line with your attacks on American society, which paint all participants in the political process, even the self-sacrificing ones with everyone’s interests at heart, as cynical, cold-hearted and without mercy.

If you spend any time in America or with Americans, I think you’ll find plenty of people who believe that Texas’ record on capital punishment is appalling, that the healthcare system needs to be basically rebuilt from scratch, and even that the Second Amendment should be repealed so that everyone and their dog can’t just go around carrying an Uzi.

Sure, there are a stack of problems with the US political establishment. But there are just as many dedicated and hardworking people who are devoting their lives to fixing those problems, and to have any sort of credibility as a political pundit, you need to acknowledge that. The landslide election of the inspirational figure of Barack Obama – for all his flaws – is the tip of the iceberg consisting of a revolution going on right now in American political thought.

Frankly, your attack on the US political establishment comes across as just the sort of crass and arrogant generalisation and preaching from the pulpit that many accuse Americans of.

I’m an Australian, and I know plenty of great people on both sides of the Atlantic. So let’s get this pissing contest over and just get on with the job of creating great science fiction; maybe even science fiction that will inspire people to think outside the box and make fundamental changes in the way so many human societies desperately need.

Jeez. Looks like I’m not going to be interviewing Charles Stross any time soon!