---
product_id: 3159841
title: "The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur) Mass Market Paperback – January 31, 2012"
brand: "hannu rajaniemi"
price: "€ 88.38"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.fr/products/3159841-the-quantum-thief-jean-le-flambeur-mass-market-paperback-january
store_origin: FR
region: France
---

# The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur) Mass Market Paperback – January 31, 2012

**Brand:** hannu rajaniemi
**Price:** € 88.38
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur) Mass Market Paperback – January 31, 2012 by hannu rajaniemi
- **How much does it cost?** € 88.38 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.fr](https://www.desertcart.fr/products/3159841-the-quantum-thief-jean-le-flambeur-mass-market-paperback-january)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Your gogol must read this before serving as Quiet
  

*by G***G on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 17, 2013*

Picking up The Quantum Thief reminded me a lot of the first time I read A Clockwork Orange, where there is so much unexplained slang that at first it seems barely comprehensible. But it's amazing how quickly you can pick up concepts from context, and pretty soon I was all over gevulot, exomemory, the quiet, gogols, and much more. As an aside, while Burgess drew heavily on Russian, Rajaniemi pulls words from Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and there is a glossary if you get stuck. I was rather surprised to encounter the word Yggdrasil again, having just read it in the Hyperion series.While I'm on comparisons, don't expect any exposition. On a scale from Ready Player One to Neuromancer, it's jammed right up at the Neuromancer end. It is disorienting, confusing, challenging and awesome. This is definitely a book that benefits from being read in large chunks. I was nibbling at it and had to constantly backtrack a few pages to pick up the story again.I have to admit to mostly ignoring the physics, I'm sure the references are exciting for quantum physicists, but I'm not particularly interested in constantly running to Google while I'm reading fiction. But there are plenty of other things to focus on, Rajaniemi has packed so many innovative ideas into the novel it's like he has been bottling them up for decades and had to get them all out in this debut novel.I particularly liked gevulot, this idea of crypto-backed privacy where, even during ordinary conversations, people exchange contracts with each other to govern how the other party sees you and how much of the conversation they are allowed to remember, made possible since all memory is stored in the city-wide exomemory."Even though the park is an open space, it is not an agora, and walking down the sandy pathways, they pass several gevulot-obscured people, their privacy fog shimmering...Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it - and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop."All residents of the Oubliette, the walking Martian city where the novel is set (!), are required to serve time as 'Quiet' where their virtual reality personality (gogol) is transferred into a machine and used in service to the city. As a result, time as a regular citizen becomes currency, there's a vaguely described but sinister threat outside the city, high-tech superheroes come-police, posthuman warrior clans descended from MMORPG clans, and a powerful collective with a universal proletarian Great Common Task. Not to mention a modern day Sherlock holmes and a heist. Like I said, lots of great ideas.Vague spoilers coming.So what's not to like? There's a point towards the end of the novel where the artful sequence of plot reveals steps out of mazes and shadows into an action-packed climax. This transition felt a little clumsy to me, and seemed fairly shallow after the mysterious build-up. The "Luke, I am your father" (and this is your mother and we're one exciting family) moment should have been cut entirely. Compared to the clever reveals earlier in the novel it was clumsy and cheesy.4.5 stars.   of my reviews at g-readinglist.blogspot.com
  
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### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Post-Singularity Heist Story. Challenging sci-fi.
  

*by D***D on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 11, 2019*

Think of this as a post-Singularity heist story. The main character is modeled after Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief from a series of stories by Maurice Leblanc. You don't need to know Lupin (or Lupin the Third) to appreciate the story—I certainly didn't.Rajaniemmi does a superb job imagining what life could be like for our digital descendants. While there are several "interludes" that assist the reader in understanding this world, Rajaniemmi throws the reader in the deep end of the pool from the start, forcing us to gather the meanings of new words from context in order to swim through the story. I'd imagine that plenty of readers have drowned along the way.The story starts with our hero, the gentleman thief, in a dilemma prison. Shortly thereafter, he's busted out of said prison, for a price, and whisked off to Mars to retrieve his memories. His rescuer/employer is Mieli, a woman who needs him to pull off a heist to rescue her lover, a secret she keeps hidden from him. The other major character is Isidore, a promising young detective in the mobile city of Oubilette on Mars. He starts off as a bit of a puppy dog, trying to please the tzadikkim, a group of highly respected vigilantes in the city, but gradually comes into his own.While some futurists will have you believe that the Singularity will bring paradise, Rajaniemmi posits a future where that certainly isn't the case. Equality is a lie. Some of those responsible for forging Creation 2.0 have granted themselves far greater powers for their uplifted minds than others. Rajaniemmi's new gods are just as capricious as the ancient ones, and their struggle for power always leaves mere mortals as collateral damage.The malleability of memory is an important theme running through the book. It seems that our digital descendants have a harder time with memory than our analog selves. While memories can be shared, it appears that they can be forged as well. While we've been struggling with disinformation on the internet the last few years, at least there's a way to uncover the truth. That doesn't seem so easy here when collective memories can be overwritten. The truth has never been so fragile.There are many interesting elements that I'm not going into such as time as currency, personality pirates, multi-level privacy shields, matter shaped by thought, death as a time of public service, and so on. Recommended for sci-fi fans looking for something challenging and different. I found myself re-reading parts to figure things out.

### ⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    The king is in the altogether!
  

*by R***E on Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 21, 2020*

This took lots of pplause and award nominations on initial publication.  I wanted to like it.  I didn’t, much.It’s easy to see what all the fuss was about.  It fairly fizzes with new ideas and for-all-I-know amazing riffs on high-frontier physics.  The SF world is prone to being dazzled by shiny new things and this certainly fits that bill.Unfortunately, it’s all a bit Emperor’s New Clothes.  Beneath all the post-human, quantum bollocks lies a fairly old-fashioned plot that isn’t all that far away from what Charles Harness and Alfred Bester were doing with more flair and depth some 70 years ago (there was one plot twist I spotted from about a million miles off, and I’m terrible at that sort of thing).  At times it also reminded me of early Delany, but for all the wrong reasons, namely a tendency for the author to be all too obviously, and annoyingly, in love with his own characters, who aren’t actually all that interesting.  Rajaniemi’s use of the present tense throughout the book makes sense, as it suggests the unpredictability and (quantum?) uncertainty of the world he portrays, but he’s not a good enough writer to avoid it becoming tiresome very quickly (though, to be fair, his English is outstanding for what I assume to be a non-native speaker).  His opening chapter is particularly problematic.  It’s a hoary old tradition for SF novels to drop the reader into a world of unfamiliar concepts and terminology.  Rajaniemi does it to an extent never seen before.  According to temperament, you could applaud him for his daring or beg him to stop showing off and just get on with it.  I’m in the latter camp.  Things do pick up after that, but it’s easy to understand why some readers gave up at that point, after their patience had been tried so much.My favourite SF is the kind that gives us an insight or perspective into ourselves and our society, a tradition that goes back all the way to Wells and even Mary Shelley.  This offers nothing of the kind.  It’s essentially a pretentious goodies versus baddies adventure enraptured with its own solipsistic puzzle-solving.  I’ve given it three stars anyway because the inventiveness is quite remarkable, but ultimately it reminded me, strangely, of Quentin Tarantino:  the work of a clearly talented creator, full of razzle-dazzle, invention and audacity, but with absolutely nothing to say.

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*Product available on Desertcart France*
*Store origin: FR*
*Last updated: 2026-01-24*