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.

Joe Haldeman‘s Marsbound can best be compared to the pop music of an idol like Britney Spears. It’s an easy and comfortable journey, but ultimately leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied due to its lack of deeper substance, real human emotion and complex ideas.

The book represents an unrealistic coming of age tale set in the context of a trite first contact experience with human-like aliens found on Mars. Its genderless main character and the holes found within its entirely predictable plot will leave many science fiction fans wondering what happened to the great science fiction author who penned The Forever War thirty years ago.

The main character of Marsbound is Carmen Dula, a 19-year-old who gets dragged along as her scientist parents join one of the first groups to make the still-risky trip to the great red planet for several years of habitation and research based in a semi-permanent facility humans have managed to erect there. First port of call for the Dula family is the Galapagos Islands, where Dula, her parents, and her annoying little brother Card are scheduled to ride a space elevator up to an orbiting space station.

Much of the information Dula relates from the first person perspective allocated to her by Haldeman are mundane, yet ultimately the sort of details that people will be fascinated with when emigration to space and other planets starts to become a reality.

For example, what sort of food do the travellers have available to them (generally it’s poor stuff, and all water is recycled; Dula ruminates to herself that all of the water has passed through her annoying brother Card several times), what sort of entertainment do they have (virtual reality technology is quite advanced), and what are the shower facilities like (bad)?

Dula also puts a high level of importance on the relationships of the various men and women around her; she has the late-teenager interest in sex and evaluates the young men in her life in terms of potential partnerships with them. With a 19-year-old female protagonist from the United States, it’s no surprise that she will eventually find love interests, engage in what we humanoids refer to as “sex” and so on.

But of course, as the book’s blurb aludes to, the humans who are taking the first, oxygen-hoarding steps in colonising Mars are shortly to discover they are not alone on the planet. An excursion beyond humanity’s facility leads to an accident, and the young Dula is rescued by an angel: “An angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad — and a message for the newly arrived inhabitants of Mars: We were here first.”

Sound like an interesting read so far? You could assume so. The intricacies of Dula’s life as a relatively normal young adult thrust into humanity’s race to conquer Mars are fascinating, and Haldeman has clearly thought through many of the logistical problems humans will eventually face when we inevitably attempt to do so. His style of writing is comfortable and you’ll find yourself relatively absorbed while you’re turning pages and wondering … what exactly is it like to have sex in lower gravity?

However, that’s about all Marsbound has going for it. Haldeman fails abundantly in his attempts to either meaningfully develop Dula’s character or to provide an exciting plot for her to operate in.

Young adults grow, develop and change at an extremely rapid pace; especially as they are exposed to more older peers and role models, and they develop the sexual side of their lives and a sophisticated world view. They are not static, reasonable people, able to calmly and rationally accept every challenge thrown at them. And the different sexes, of course, have entirely different challenges and approaches to meeting them.

Joe Haldeman, credit: Mikko Aarnio

Yet this is how the mid-60′s Haldeman portrays the 19-year-old Dula. And for all the insight that is given into her female nature, she might as well have been male. Worse, most of the other characters are simply forgettable cardboard cut-outs.

Haldeman pairs this lack of character development with an entirely predictable first contact plot that contains all the elements of the traditional first contact science fiction tale; but without any of the excitement and alien-ness that is so fundamental to this type of story.

Remember Heinlein‘s Stranger from a Strange Land? Remember how you felt after the final climactic, mind-bending scene, how the book make you question what ways of thinking were essentially human, and which could be moulded, changed, developed, under the influence of an alien intelligence? Or what about the slowly developing and completely alien world contained in Arthur C. Clarke‘s Rendezvous with Rama, that you didn’t really understand even by the end of the book?

Yup. None of that grandeur here. Marsbound‘s “aliens” are as rational, reasonable and ultimately as boring as Dula herself.

Now it would be easy to say that Haldeman’s getting old — he’s been writing for more than 30 years. However it’s important to remember that the author won both the Nebula and Hugo awards back for his 1997 novel Forever Peace, and he appears to have been pumping out books regularly since then; about one a year, according to Wikipedia.

No, my theory is that Haldeman has actually underestimated the complexity of the first contact genre he undertook in Marsbound, given that much of his previous best work has been focused on the military science fiction sub-genre, informed very much by his own experiences in the Vietnam War. Then too, you could make an argument that his approach to the 19-year-old Dula didn’t ring right due to the age factor.

The cover of the paperback copy of Marsbound that I reviewed contains a quote from Stephen King. “If there was a Fort Knox for the science fiction writers who really matter, we’d have to lock Haldeman up there,” says King. Personally, I hope Haldeman can break his writing out of the chains he appears to have imposed on it and challenge himself and the readers once more for his next effort.