Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Fractal Prince
    The Fractal Prince
    The Fractal Prince
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Fractal Prince

    Written by Hannu Rajaniemi

    Narrated by Scott Brick

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    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 SchrOdinger 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 universeand we discover what the future held for Earth.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 19, 2013
    ISBN9781470361044
    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.

    More audiobooks from Hannu Rajaniemi

    Related to The Fractal Prince

    Titles in the series (1)

    View More
    View More

    Related audiobooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Inhibitor Phase

      Aug 11, 2021

      Inhibitor Phase
      2 min read

    • Article

      Children Of Ruin

      May 22, 2019

      Children Of Ruin
      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2018

      — After the New York Times newsfeed from the week of May 6–11, 2018 This week in which faculty members at the University of Floridashove black graduates offstage for dancing in honor of what is regularly denied them; in which Nordstrom Rackapologizes

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      May 1, 2019

      We found ourselves to be quite fondof the ad campaignundermining late-stage capitalism: how the sprightly old womankept bursting into private conversationsat the candlelit restaurant and shouting, You can’t eat nickels!!and then doing that little hip

      3 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      Oh, Corona

      Jan 1, 2024

      Books The Lights by Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023 128 pp., $26.00 (hardcover) According to the latest Times article on the qualitative merits of bot art, Ben Lerner has lent excerpts from his new poetry collection to a group of venture c

      7 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2024

      I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little poc

      6 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    • Article

      Dead Good

      Jul 21, 2022

      “This is a straightup arena banger plowing through a not-so-subtle social commentary about the epic clown-show we are all living in today. Addicted to ‘likes’ and ‘thumbs ups’, people really will do just about anything for that digital dopamine.” “At

      3 min read

    • Article

      THE FIRST FIVE PAGES: KJ Maitland

      Apr 1, 2021

      Writing historical crime thrillers often feels like one of those crazy circus acts where you have to stand on the backs of two galloping horses, with one foot on each, trying to keep your balance. One of the horses is the historical facts, the other

      6 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Dec 1, 2021

      Table Talk
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Silence of Witches

      Dec 10, 2019

      The Silence of Witches
      6 min read

    • Article

      Voyage around My Cell

      Oct 10, 2019

      Voyage around My Cell
      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Fractal Prince

    4/5

    14 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 1/5
      Too complex for me. Physics was not a good subject ,lol.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 3/5
      As difficult as the first in the series.
    • 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.
    • 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.