Audiobook9 hours
The Causal Angel
Written by Hannu Rajaniemi
Narrated by Roger Wayne
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
With his infectious love of storytelling in all its forms, his rich characterization, and his unrivalled grasp of cutting-edge science, Hannu Rajaniemi has swiftly set a new benchmark for SF in the twenty-first century. Rajaniemi's future is one in which quantum effects can be manipulated by the powerful to unknowable ends; an era in which some are gods and billions of others are enslaved for the processing power of their brains; where in the inner Solar System, the once-human Sobornost endlessly iterate themselves in vast, planet-sized guberniyas, while casually running experiments on the photosphere of the sun.
In this world, Jean le Flambeur has broken out of a virtual prison and, later, into the mind of a living god. Now his one-time rescuer, the warrior Mieli, is a prisoner herself. To get her back, Jean will need tools: A quantum pyramid scheme, a pair of physical bodies, a nugget of computronium, a bunch of entangled EPR pairs, and a few very special hydrogen bombs.
Jean le Flambeur, gentleman adventurer, is back. The solar system will tremble from one end to the other before he's done.
In this world, Jean le Flambeur has broken out of a virtual prison and, later, into the mind of a living god. Now his one-time rescuer, the warrior Mieli, is a prisoner herself. To get her back, Jean will need tools: A quantum pyramid scheme, a pair of physical bodies, a nugget of computronium, a bunch of entangled EPR pairs, and a few very special hydrogen bombs.
Jean le Flambeur, gentleman adventurer, is back. The solar system will tremble from one end to the other before he's done.
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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Reviews for The Causal Angel
Rating: 4.070945554054053 out of 5 stars
4/5
148 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As I approached the final act of The Causal Angel, Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean Le Flambeur Series that started with The Quantum Thief, there was an uptick in the action, a movement toward battle and denouement. Giant space ships and lethal weapons were brought to bear, planetary defenses were invoked, and warriors on both sides came to grips...
Unfortunately, I'm not sure I understood half of it. The weapons, vehicles and concepts seemed to require a robust understanding of quantum and theoretical physics and computer science, neither of which I can claim, even for all of my interest in science and science fiction. The world that Rajaniemi has imagined is on the other side of the singularity, and it is a world that is difficult to recognize as descending from our own.
So, clearly, it's brilliant. I just struggled to understand and relate. Call me stupid, call me dense, but I see the series as a brilliant, but missed opportunity.
I very badly wanted to love the book, and I spent some time clicking through Google researching the terms and concepts, using both a wiki about the series and Wikipedia itself. It helped, but the more I read and the more obscure jargon that I bumped up against the more I became convinced that my efforts would be futile. The learning curve is steep, and Hannu does little to assist his reader, utilizing in action descriptions that are short of a helpful infodumps, but oh! how I would have loved one.
Sure, usually I prefer that the author focus on the story, showing only a glimpse of the world building that is beyond view, hinting at what is out there beyond the action. The Causal Angel does this. But because the world is so far from our own, the glimpses are insufficient. It makes for difficult reading.
It doesn't help that the story picks up immediately from where it left off, requiring some back tracking by the reader to refresh memory. And my understanding of what was going on in the plot was never really crystal clear in the first place. Compound everything that I missed in The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, and now The Causal Angel together, and I'm sure that I was unable to enjoy the story to the fullest.
That said, I still liked the book, and though I'll have difficulty recommending it to more than the most hard-core of science fiction fans, I really DID enjoy it. Rajaniemi has a brilliant vision of the future, extrapolating in a way that I think is far more accurate that a lot of other science fiction. Additionally, he understands how to tell a story and, but for the high barrier that the theoretical physics and computer science presents, does spin an interesting tale.
I'm glad I read it. I just wish I could have lost myself in it a bit easier. Escaping into the imagined world is hard when I have to keep coming out to look up terms I don't understand or concepts that weren't even clear in the first book, let alone the second or third. Understanding them is clearly necessary to the plot, and they just aren't easy. If the ease of access had been greater, I would have put Hannu on the list of Hugo worthy writers. His vision is there and his writing is in the neighborhood that should get him awards. He imagines a world where consciousness has transcended the physical, where people living in a constant state of MMORPG, where copies of the self can be made, saved, and utilized in computing power. It's mind-blowing.
But the conceptual difficulty puts the novel out of reach of many, and that's unfortunate. I will read whatever Rajaniemi writes next because I am curious what else he has in the quiver. I hope it will be more accessible, because he is brilliant, his writing is brilliant, and his vision is brilliant. But I hope he can also make it accessible.
A word about the cover art on this series: I love it. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nice storytelling (although I felt it abused the word quantic in the first half of the book), although the science part is mostly missing. Has nice ideas and crazy ideas for the sake of putting the characters in some situations, creating a strange, beautiful but somehow unbounded universe (it is never clear what is possible and what not, and mostly it seems like anything is possible). In this "noisy" world characters struggle to come with an identity and they shift many times from one direction to another. Jean le Flambeur must prevent the destruction of Saturn and rescue Mieli who has been captured by the Zoku. After stealing his old spaceship and discovering more about his past, he sacrifices this self to let the others escape. But there is always "another" Jean in the prison to continue... which is an end fitting the feeling of the book
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5failed to grab me, too many invented words, author trying to make me work too hard rather than entertaining me