The Quantum Thief: Hannu Rajaniemi Is Smarter Than You

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Quantum Thief: Hannu Rajaniemi Is Smarter Than You

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Ok I just read both these books. They were good? I guess? But what the gently caress happened?

Clarity, people! If the reader doesn't receive your story, you haven't told it!

# ¿ Nov 24, 2012 21:42

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 12:12

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

coffeetable posted:

Not sure I agree with this. I'd claim that if your target reader can't deduce your story then you haven't told it.

Also there isn't much in the series that isn't laid out explicitly, but the explicit bits are usually a sentence long and appear some time after you first asked the relevant questions, so if you're a fast reader they're very easy to miss. Which plot points are you confused about?

Actually I think I understand most of the bare bones, at least, except for the last five or ten pages of Fractal Prince. At the end there I lost track of who was/had been in whose/which body talking to exactly which/who exactly when again? How much of Jean's narrative was just the mimic? etc..

TouretteDog posted:

I really think that the big gap between the Sobornost and the Zoku boils down to who they consider a "person". The Sobornost think that deterministic simulations of people really are people; you can make a million copies of someone and they're just as real as the 'original'. The Zoku think that the Sobornost and their gogols are all just dead code, and it's impossible to copy people. To steal a phrase from somewhere else: "computers just compute, only people count".

The funny thing is, the entire story opens with Jean very clearly shown to be a gogol running in the dilemma prison, but we're given enough 1st person access to his internal states to show that the author at least considers him a "real" person. Same thing for Mieli when she and all her gogol-copies tear poo poo up at the end of Fractal Prince. Rajaniemi seems to be sort of on the side of the Sobornost, at least as far as "duck-typing" people goes.

Edit to add: the Great Common Task is literally resurrecting everyone who's ever lived inside of one of their simulations, and making everyone who's still alive immortal the same way. If you can't copy someone (which the Zoku believe), you can't possibly resurrect them. I think it's not that one faction's technology fucks with the other ones, it's a fundamental disagreement on what's even possible to do. Zoku think that the copies are all dead, and the Sobornost are mass murderers; the Sobornost think that the Zoku are standing in the way of the Great Common Task, and so are basically trying to be murderers on a cosmological scale.

The funny thing seems to be that each "side" seems to act as if the other side's viewpoint is correct, at least to some extent. The Sobornost have "prime" identities and then progressions of less and less "authoritative" copies; Mieli gets incredibly freaked out by the idea of the Sobornost making a copy of herself.

Do we get any clues as to who Mieli's "real" parents are? It's interesting that she was raised apart. I think it's going to be clear that she was engineered for every aspect of this, all along.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Nov 26, 2012

# ¿ Nov 26, 2012 00:23

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

The amnesiac protagonist is pretty much a classic trope; see Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber or John C. Wright's Golden Age trilogy for examples. (I don't mean that as a knock -- Amnesiac protagonists are probably my single favorite SF trope period. I don't think I've ever read a book with an amnesiac protagonist that I didn't like).

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Nov 26, 2012

# ¿ Nov 26, 2012 16:02

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