I just finished reading The Quantum Magician, by Derek Künsken.
I picked this book up because it sounded similar to The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is one of my favorite science fiction novels. Both are far-future science fiction about con artists applying old-school games to high-technology targets, but the futures they postulate and the cons they undertake are both entirely different from each other. Despite its thiefly title, The Quantum Thief is an adventure novel. The Quantum Magician, on the other hand, is a classic heist story. The main character is given a job, assembles a crew, survives multiple betrayals, and comes out with one final twist at the very end of the story.
I’m going to be perfectly honest here: I didn’t fully understand the logistics of the plan in this novel. The details, though, are so specifically good that it’s hard to complain about it, but a better explanation of what exactly they were doing under the ice would have been appreciated.
That’s my only complaint about this novel. Now I want to wax eloquent about the worldbuilding, because goddamn it is good. This setting is fascinating, revealed to us in bits and pieces as the team is assembled and travels around the galaxy setting its pieces in motion. All of the advanced science in this book is either high-concept time-space-distortion wormhole stuff, which is fine, or weird genetic constructions, which is really interesting. The Puppets and the Mongrels especially are such incredibly weird human subspecies that it’s hard to describe them fully. The Puppets, specifically, are so, so very weird. We spend the entire book with different characters acting disgusted towards them, calling them creepy and whatnot, and we never really figure out why until the heist gets underway and we see more of how they act in their natural habitat. It’s fucking strange, and unsettling, and such damn good worldbuilding. This is stuff I want to steal for my own settings.
The plot is a satisfyingly twisty heist tale, the setting is great, and the characters are endlessly interesting, even if one of them does fall into the “haha isn’t it funny to have this character with no impulse control doing dangerous things” trap that is never as entertaining as authors seem to think it is. But a few of them are genuinely affecting–the AI that thinks it’s a reincarnated saint, the foul-mouthed fighter pilot who can’t survive at pressures higher than four hundred atmospheres, the old con man with an incurable disease, the self-centered geneticist who designs bioweapons to defend his apartment lobby. Or their relentless stalker, the superspy in the robot body who can’t be killed by conventional weaponry but looks like a badly-made scarecrow. Or the creepy, creepy Puppet priests who look for theological meaning in the tormented screams of the people who created them. This setting is great, and the way the narration changes subtly (or dramatically) whenever the story is being told from a different one of these many crazy perspectives is an absolute delight. I especially like the chapters from the perspective of Stills, the genetically-engineered high-pressure fighter pilot. Dipping into his foul-mouthed vernacular is a good way to break up the more self-serious quantum deep thinkers in the book.
I really liked this book, and I’m grabbing the sequel right away. I want to see more of these characters, and I want to meet whatever new weird people get introduced. I’m so glad that I get more of this stuff right away.