The Fractal Prince
"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 The Fractal Prince, 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.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
10mentions
9people
2015–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I've been reading the books by Hannu Rajaniemi. Finished The Quantum Thief a while ago and now reading The Fractal Prince.
It's some of the best sci-fi I've read. Very interesting depiction of technology and I love how the different types of tech and societal structures are not explained, just showcased and talked about like it's obvious until you get it. It reminds me of Philip K. Dick but with a lot more scientifically grounded yet far out technology.
- Not super related, but for whatever reason I've had a flare up in thinking about sci-fi moving cities/neighborhoods again. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 with a Mars city going around the terminator (not super well described tbh but fun), Hannu Rajaniemi's Fractal Prince (book #2 of Jean le Flambeur's series) with a reconfiguring Mars city wandering around on stilts (iirc). We live in an age with so many new malleable systems, but so much of the world about us is fixed and rooted, and these sci-fi realms where not just people but places too move about is an interesting idea. That what I thought of, seeing the traveling neighborhood title.
I dig this idea a lot. I hope we can expand more on remote work, make great use of new freedoms for such excellent purposes.
- One Finnish scifi author that I've particularly enjoyed is Hannu Rajaniemi, who has a PhD in Physics and writes excellent speculative novels like The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince.
- I occasionally read choice excerpts of whatever I'm reading to my wife. But what I've been reading lately is mostly Joe Abercrombie and Richard Morgan, so she typically cringes ;) However, I have managed to interest her in Neal Stephenson (Diamond Age, and maybe D.O.D.O.) and Hannu Rajaniemi (Fractal Prince trilogy).
- Anything by Iain M. Banks. Start with "The Player of Games" and "Consider Phlebas".
Anything by Vernor S. Vinge especially "Zones of Thought" series.
"Daemon", "Freedom(tm)", "Kill Decision" and "Influx" by Daniel Suarez.
"The Martian" by Andy Weir.
Anything by Neal Stephenson, especially "Reamde: A Novel" and "Cryptonomicon".
Anything by Hannu Rajaniemi, especially "The Fractal Prince".
- I know Hannu, and he tells an interesting story about getting his first book published. I should write it up sometime ... in my Copious Free Time ...
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* The Quantum Thief
* The Fractal Prince
* The Causal Angel
Actually, most of the story is on his WikiPedia page:
