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The Fractal Prince
The Fractal Prince
The Fractal Prince
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The Fractal Prince

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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"The good thing is, no one will ever die again. The bad thing is, everyone will want to."

A physicist receives a mysterious paper. The ideas in it are far, far ahead of current thinking and quite, quite terrifying. In a city of "fast ones," shadow players, and jinni, two sisters contemplate a revolution.
And on the edges of reality a thief, helped by a sardonic ship, is trying to break into a Schrödinger box for his patron. In the box is his freedom. Or not.

Jean de Flambeur is back. And he's running out of time.

In Hannu Rajaniemi's sparkling follow-up to the critically acclaimed international sensation The Quantum Thief, he returns to his awe-inspiring vision of the universe…and we discover what the future held for Earth.



At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 27, 2012
ISBN9781429986632
Author

Hannu Rajaniemi

Born and raised in Finland, HANNU RAJANIEMI lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is a founding director of a financial consultancy, ThinkTank Maths. He is the holder of several advanced degrees in mathematics and physics. Multilingual from an early age, he writes his science fiction in English. He is the author of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel.

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Rating: 4.178571428571429 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of the reasons I read non-fiction and classics is that they tend to challenge me more than the books I enjoy reading the most. I'll pick up science-fiction or fantasy because I want to escape, relax, and take a break. But too much, and I get bored.

    I did not have that problem when I read this book. Not one bit.

    Hannu Rajaniemi, though, has found a way to both escape and challenge my mind at the same time. The challenge is such that, as I have seen one reviewer note, I would not recommend Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief trilogy to the "uninitiated" to science fiction. Unlike the Star Wars, or even Star Trek, universes, where the laws of science are as ignored as any swords and sorcery fantasy (and, indeed, Luke Skywalker may have more in common with the questing, sword welding hero than not), Rajaniemi does not ignore physics.

    He just finds a way to weld physics to do what he wants.

    This is not to say that The Fractal Prince is dry and sodden down by the weight of physics. In fact, quite the contrary. Instead, the writing moves so fast, so quickly, that it is only the sprinkling of labels and jargon that reminds me that Rajaniemi is even thinking about it. What makes it feel real is this very awareness. The Fractal Prince is so far into the future that it is difficult recognizing what humanity has become. A lot of writers decide to slow down the technological progress when this happens to enable them to anchor their story in a reality that is easier to describe, if just because it looks like our own reality, but more shiny, with more space ships that look and move like gravity bound jet craft and laser guns that act more like semi-automatic firearms.

    Perhaps it is because Rananiemi's is so cavalier about his ambition to create and remain honest to the setting of his story that his ambition is understated. In the universe of The Quantum Thief --who we might as well just call by name--in Jean de Flambeu's universe, we cannot help but see the characters as foreign, even alien. Gods and goddesses compete with warminds and self-loops, and a dozen other entities, all apparently descended from the race we call humanity, somehow melded by technology and preserved, copied, enhanced, and expanded.

    And if that doesn't all blow your mind (at least when you read it), it's probably because you've become lost in the jargon. Rajanamiemi pulls terms from a half dozen languages that are not native to our planet, but totally uncommon to the western reader. I admit that I drew on Google more than once to get the gist for what he was intending with a word, and then even then I had to add to what I found an expanded understanding of what it meant in the context of the Quantum Thief, universe. Russian, Japanese, and Finnish all contribute to the vocabulary.

    Pick up the book, though, push through the vocabulary, and you might find yourself a story that is both creative and familiar. Taking place in the space between Mars, where most of the plot in the first book in the trilogy took place, and Earth and on Earth itself, The Fractal Prince takes a page from A Thousand and One Nights . Not only is the setting of the heist a world reminiscent of the pre-Islamic Arabic world, but takes place in a shining city on the edge of a hostile desert, where decay and corruption are hiding just below the surface and where a story is as forbidden as the worship of images in modern day Islam. And yet, like our own world, the forbidden become a currency in themselves...

    At its root, under all the science, the fiction, the clever jargon and imaginative settings, this is the story of a heist, and Rajanamiemi lays the pieces in place carefully, hiding strings until the end, letting the reader see them only as the plot comes together to a final denoument that is fully satisfying.

    But do not going into it without your eyes wide open. This is not space opera. It's science fiction, and Rajanamiemi does it well. It will both challenge and entertain, and really, that's what good fiction should do.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found it less engaging than The Quantum Thief - it was quite confusing at times, but that might be because I read it in fits and starts rather than right through. Still some brilliant ideas though.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is Book 2 of the Quantum Thief trilogy. It was a real CF. Too many new concepts only partially defined. I really enjoyed "The Quantum Thief" but I disliked "Fractal Prince" and 4/5 through the book was considering bailing out, but grudgingly stuck it out. I discovered there is actually a web site defining the series concepts and players. It was like going from trigonometry (bk1)to calculus (bk2). Too many deductive leaps are required of the reader. Also, too many leaps period, like it was brutally edited. We were on Mars the Venus then Earth. Newly created words are great if they're directly or indirectly explained Hannu Rajaniemi has great potential as shown by Quantum Thief, but Fractal Prince should has been twice as long to effectively handle new concepts and introduce new players and scene transitions. All in all I found it confusing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ridiculously complex but good fun again, this continuation of the series starts to explain a few of the concepts and backstory that had been left for the reader to imagine in the previous book Qantum Thief.So far we know there were at least three protocols developed for digital uploading of conciousness with different rules and prohibitions from their proponents; these are now running as disembodied minds on various spacebound hardware, with the ability to inhabit nanotech custome bodies; a War was fought, and a period of collapse (or maybe just a signle cataclysm). The winners were the Soborost, the Zulu survivied, and the remenents left on Earth were the big losers. However the Soborost are not a unified front and of the six big fractions, rifts are developing between them. Copies of each personality called gogols are scheming for advantage of their branch and faction. And While our hero Jean Flambeau knows this, he is powerless to prevent the scheming going on around him - especially as he delcined to Steal his old personality back, and remains somewhat of a fragment of his former self. However he did steal a Box containing some source code and an emotionless mind fragment know as a Dragon. He is still trying to redeem his promise to his benefactors who released him from prison. This benefactor is an old (close to the original) copy of one of the Soborost factions - aiming at the current ruler. Jean is trying to steal another powerful code artifact which is buried on Earth. And so he and Mieli venture amoung the lost souls of the slums, rife with disembodied minds, and wildocde - free form nanotech than corrupts all it encounters, all bound up inot a n Abrian Nights esque story construct. It isn't clear why the mind copies need stories.The levels of betrayal and counter-betrayal are far too complex to keep track of, and most of the time you have no idea who is 'actually' loyal to which faction (including of ocurse the miriad Earth bound factions too). But it does all just about work, and it is more or less explained by the final (very cool) showdown. The explanations are definetly better paced here than in the FT, so there is a more of a (although still far from totally) clear understanding of what is going on. In terms of "real" physics, it is perhaps a bit less belivable. Rajaniemi keeps his distinction between first and third person voices for the main and supporting characters, which I continue to find a good way to mark viewpoint changes - but probably not something all readers will enjoy. There is a distinct lack of the banter which enlivened the first book. ALl the characters are far more serious. The emotion driving the narrative is provided by a new temporary heorine, Twaddedd, a neglected rich girl on Earth (who plays much the same role as Isodore did on Mars in QT). However the complexity of the plot remains an issue, with several concpets still remaining unclear. Given the ending it is likely that no explanation will be forthcoming in the next part. Fast moving, complex but overall fun and an interesting twist on the issues of digital conciousness.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    As difficult as the first in the series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I didn't like this book as much as the first - but it is still better than most of the stuff out there. This story is set on a changed Earth - "Wild Code", that is nano-technology run amuck - will change a person if precautions aren't taken. The remains of un-changed humanity hangs on by a thread, only existing because the post-humans need something from them, and by the indifference of the great clans.This book is set in a "Arabian Nights Setting" with intertwined stories, that go back and forth but mostly forward. Its a nice touch, but at times, can feel a bit slow. The story is told with lingo from this world, at times, you might know exactly what is happening, but you always understand the plot. The jargon makes the story seem so much more - large. As for characters - well written characters, although in the first book, they seemed more real. This is a book where you have to pay attention. Between the Jargon and the fast plot, every sentence is important. A well-written sequel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fantastic book. A bit lost at the beginning and not entirely sure about the epilogue but the rest of the book is entertaining and very well crafted.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A worthy sequel, no doubt. Lacked a bit of 'punch' of the first one, though perhaps that is because I, the reader, now knew the universe.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I enjoyed this sequel nearly as much as the first book. Some things were explained more fully, others were new concepts that made me use my brain even more. Looking forward to book 3.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Too complex for me. Physics was not a good subject ,lol.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Second book in the series and pretty good with it's own identity and fascinating ideas. I didn't really like Sirr the way I like the Oubliette. It felt a little too fantasy-ish even by the standards of this trilogy.
    However the concepts and characters I absolutely loved. I will warn, however, that this is a book you have to read more than once to understand.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ending is a bit of a letdown, to be honest.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I didn't finish. I even tried referencing a character/language guide at one point to help clarify all the vocabulary the author invented and it just wasn't worth the effort. It's not a bad book, I'm just not very interested in a fiction book I need to take notes on in order to understand the basic plot.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found this book to be as excitingly incomprehensible as its predecessor, 'The Quantum Thief', although from time to time - especially from about mid-way through - plot reveals surfaced that could actually be related back to our own time and world, or something recognisably close to it. This time round, we see Earth in the aftermath of some sort of cataclysmic war between AIs and uploaded consciousnesses. The boundaries between real and virtual worlds are even more blurred than in the first book. There are more characters in play here as well, though identities are fairly fluid and people do not always turn out to be who they say they are.(I have to admit that I kept wanting to read "jinn jar" [a portable device for holding a disembodied consciousness] as "jam jar" which gave me an amusing mix if images.)I suspect there are two ways to read this book; either work carefully through it, trying to unpick the actual meaning of each of the plot devices, or blast straight through, glossing over the weirdness and enjoying the story-telling and the characters. I took the second route and was fascinated by all the strangeness even though I wasn't following every twist and turn of the text - a bit like listening to an opera in a foreign language that you don't fully understand but enjoying the tunes anyway.

Book preview

The Fractal Prince - Hannu Rajaniemi

1

The Thief and the Box

On the day the Hunter comes for me, I am killing ghost cats from the Schrödinger Box.

Q-dot tendrils like sparks from a Tesla coil trail from my fingers into the little box of lacquered wood floating in the middle of my cabin. Behind it, displayed on one gently curving wall, is the Highway – a constantly flowing river of spaceships and thoughtwisps, a starry brushstroke in the dark. A branch of the gravitational artery through the Solar System our ship, Perhonen, is following from Mars to Earth. But today, I’m blind to its glory. My world is the size of a black box, just big enough to hold a wedding ring, the mind of a god – or the key to my freedom.

I lick sweat from my lips. My field of vision is a spiderweb of quantum protocol diagrams. Perhonen’s mathematics gogols whisper and mutter in my head. To help my all-too-human senses and brain, they translate the problem into yosegi: opening a Japanese trick box. The quantum protocols are sensations, imperfections and valleys in the marquetry, pressure points inside the wood like tense muscles, faint grins of sliding sections. I need to find the right sequence that opens it.

Except that here, the trick is not opening it too early, the wood patterns are hidden in the countless qubits inside – each zero and one at the same time – and the moves are quantum logic operations, executed by the arrays of lasers and interferometers the gogols have built in the ship’s wings. It all amounts to what the ancients called quantum process tomography: trying to figure out what the Box does to the probe states we ease into it, gently, like lockpicks. It feels like trying to juggle eight-side Rubik’s cubes while trying to solve them at the same time.

And every time I drop one, God kills a billion kittens.

The gogols light up a section of the diagram, red threads in the tangle. Immediately, I can see another section that is linked. If we rotate this arrow and that state and apply a Hadamard gate and measure

The imaginary wood beneath my fingers groans and clicks.

‘Sesame,’ I whisper.

Drathdor the zoku elder liked to talk, and it wasn’t that hard to get him to explain what a Box was (without letting on that I had stolen one from their zoku twenty years ago, of course).

Imagine a box, he said. Now put a cat in it. Along with a death machine: a bottle of poison, cyanide, say, connected to a mechanism with a hammer and a single atom of a radioactive element. In the next hour, the atom either decays or not, either triggering or not triggering the hammer. So, in the next hour, the cat is either alive or dead.

Quantum mechanics claims that there is no definite cat in the box, only a ghost, a superposition of a live cat and a dead cat. That is, until we open it and look. A measurement will collapse the system into one state or the other. So goes Schrödinger’s thought experiment.

It is completely wrong, of course. A cat is a macroscopic system, and there is no mysterious intervention by a magical observer needed to make it live or die: just its interaction with the rest of the Universe, a phenomenon called decoherence, provides the collapse into one macrostate. But in the microscopic world – for qubits, quantum-mechanical equivalents of ones and zeroes – the Schrödinger’s cat is real.

The Box contains trillions of ghost cats. The live cat states encode information. A mind, even, a living, thinking mind. The Box qubits have been rotated into a limbo state between nothingness and existence. The mind inside would not notice anything – a set of quantum gates can let it continue thinking, feeling, dreaming. If it stays inside, all is well. But if it tries to get out, any interaction with the environment will bring the Universe down on it like a ton of bricks and collapse it into nothingness. Bad kitty, dead kitty.

‘So what do you put in a Box like that?’ I asked Drathdor.

‘Something very, very dangerous,’ he said.

A section of the Box in the qubit map we have created over the last week lights up like a city at night. I can feel it: the unknotting that always comes with a job when you discover the flaw in a lock or a security system or a con mark’s mind. Eagerly, I close my eyes and follow the flow of moves. The wood panels slide beneath my fingers. The gogols sing with the joy of the orgasmic jolts of pleasure they receive from computing spectral sequences of Hilbert space operators. More light in the map. The lid moves, ever so slightly—

And snaps shut. The next register dies, for good. The protocol network ties itself into a knot. The last measurement shows only death. I have destroyed another fragment of the contents of the Box.

I swear and throw the accursed thing across the cabin. The q-dot tendrils tear and dissolve. The Box bounces from the starry field of the wall and spins in the air.

The words that have been ringing in my head for days come back to me.

I am not Jean le Flambeur.

A small white butterfly lands deftly on the Box and brings its spin to a halt, fluttering its wings.

‘Before you break anything,’ the ship says in its soothing, feminine voice, ‘I would like to point out that this was all your idea.’

The ship is right: it was my idea. Or, rather, my earlier self’s idea. The original Jean le Flambeur, a thief and mind burglar of legend, an all around nice guy. Who left me with nothing apart from a few fragmented memories, old enemies, a prison sentence – and the thing inside the Box.

‘Touché,’ I say.

‘That’s three days straight now, Jean. Maybe you should leave it alone for a while.’

‘There is no time. You told me it’s decohering.’

Fatigue stings my eyes like sand. A reminder that, in spite of appearances, I am not free. Perhonen’s captain Mieli stubbornly refuses to give me root access to my Sobornostmade body, keeping it firmly within baseline human operating parameters in spite of my assurances that my previous attempts to escape our involuntary partnership were misunderstandings and that I am firmly committed to paying my debt of honour to her and her elusive Sobornost employer. Honest.

But I can’t give up. When the ship first examined the Box, it found that the quantum information inside is short-lived. In a few days, the kittens will die of old age.

‘Almost as if the designer deliberately wanted to introduce a time limit. Like a game,’ Perhonen says.

‘As you say, it’s a zoku device. What do you expect?’ There is a great variety of zokus out there, but they are universally game-obsessed. Not that the Sobornost are immune to the lure. A memory of their Dilemma Prison and its deadly games makes me shiver – not to mention its resident monster, the All-Defector: the shapeshifting nightmare who wore my own face to beat me. Whatever job Mieli’s boss got me out for has to be better than that.

‘I don’t know what to expect. Neither Mieli nor you have told me what’s inside it. Or what it has to do with our destination. Which I’m less than keen to visit, by the way.’

‘Earth isn’t that bad,’ I say.

‘Have you been there since the Collapse?’

‘I don’t know. But I know we have to go there.’ I spread my hands. ‘Look, I just steal things to earn my keep. If you have a problem with the big picture, take it up with Mieli.’

‘Not with the mood she’s in,’ the ship says. The butterfly avatar makes a circuit around my head. ‘But maybe you should talk to her. About the big picture.’

Mieli has been acting strangely. She is not the life of the party at the best of times, but she has been even quieter than usual during the slow weeks of our journey from Mars, spending most of her time in the pilot’s crèche or in the main cabin, meditating.

‘That,’ I say, ‘seems like an exceptionally bad idea. Usually, I’m the last person in the world she wants to talk to.’ What is the ship talking about?

‘You could be surprised.’

‘Fine. Right after I get this thing open.’ I frown at the Box. The butterfly avatar settles on my nose, making me blink furiously until I have to brush it away.

‘It sounds to me like you are trying to distract yourself from something,’ it says. ‘Is there something you are not telling me?’

‘Not a thing. I’m an open book.’ I sigh. ‘Don’t you have better things to do? They created the first psychotherapist bots about four hundred years ago.’

‘What makes you think you are not talking to one?’ The avatar dissolves into a bubble of q-dots, leaving behind a faint ozone smell. ‘Get some sleep, Jean.’

I touch the Box, feel the solid shape of the warm wood, make it spin in the air again until its edges become a blur. The movement makes me drowsy. The ship is right. It is easier to think about it than about Mars and the castle and the goddess. And as soon as I close my eyes, they all come back.

The memory castle on Mars could have been mine: all its rooms with their wax and brass statues, the treasures and zoku jewels, stolen from diamond minds and gods. It’s all gone now, my whole life, eaten by an Archon who turned it into a prison. The only thing left is the Box, and the memories that came with it.

I could have reached out and taken it all back, but I didn’t. Why not?

I am not Jean le Flambeur.

I walk down the gold-and-marble corridor of the castle in my mind and look through the open doors, into the rooms of stolen memories.

There is the time I did not want to be Jean le Flambeur. I lived on Mars, in a place of forgetting, the Oubliette. I made a new face. I made a new life. I found a woman called Raymonde. I hid my secrets, even from myself.

There is the Spike, a Singularity both in technology and spacetime. A bright flash in the Martian night, a dying Jupiter raining quantum dreams down on the people of the Oubliette.

There is the Hallway of Birth and Death, the building I made to remind immortals of how things end.

There is the lover of an Oubliette artist whose memories I…sought inspiration from. He was touched by the Spike. In his mind, I saw the fire of the gods. And I had to have it.

There is the Martian zoku. They brought the Box with them, from the Protocol War. Inside, a captured Sobornost Founder gogol, one of the rulers of the Inner System. A trapped god.

There is the girl called Gilbertine – another thing I could not help but want, even when I shouldn’t – whose memories I hid the Box in. I wore a face filled with a cold purpose that feels alien now. Being Prometheus, that sort of thing, the old me told her. That’s what the goddess with the serpent smile who Mieli serves wants me to be.

There is the woman Xuexue from the robot garden who was an uploader on Earth. She turned children into deathless software slaves in the sky, in the time before the Collapse, before Sobornost. That is what pulls me to the home of humanity now, the knowledge that this memory has a purpose, that there is something in the world of ghosts that I need.

And then there is the closed door.

I open my eyes. The Box is still spinning. I have been distracting myself. Earth is where the answers lie – and inside the locked room in my head.

What would Jean le Flambeur do?

I take the Box and hum a few notes of Stan Getz. A circular opening appears in the curving surface of one of the walls. Much of the ship’s structure is made from Oortian smartcoral – or väki, as they call it – and it responds to music. I have had enough time to watch Mieli to figure that out. No doubt the ship knows what I’m doing, but I like the modicum of privacy that comes from having a hiding place.

I put the Box inside and make an inventory of the contents. A couple of zoku jewels – tiny dark amber ovals the size of quail eggs – stolen on Mars when the detective Isidore Beautrelet and I went to his girlfriend Pixil’s reincarnation party. There is also her Realmspace sword, which I brought with me from the battle with my other self, Jean le Roi.

It’s not much, but it’s a

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