varjohaltia | Hannu Rajaniemi: The Fractal Prince (Reply)

A sequel to The Quantum Thief, an original and imaginative mix of hard scifi and cyberpunk from a mathematician-cum-author from my alma mater and hometown. The entire story of a mathematician scoring a three book deal in his third language with a major publisher with only a draft of the first sounds so improbable that it in itself seems like science fiction. Either way, the first novel was pretty neat, and I felt an additional slight amount of patriotic and hometown obligation to get the next installment as well.

Unfortunately, The Fractal Prince has trouble rising above the bar that Mr. Rajaniemi set himself. It's no worse, certainly, but... the major ideas largely were already introduced, and the new car smell is gone. I'm still slightly ambivalent of the use of Finnish terms and names, and I'm not sure how much a non-Finnish speaking audience loses by not getting the full connotations. The prose is complicated and well crafted and the world continues to be so abstract and fantastic that you have to really pay attention to what's being described. The relationship between the protagonists doesn't seem to advance much in any direction.

I had commented about the "Britishness" of The Quantum Thief and the same applies here. The style and feel of this work is much more reminiscent of Banks, Stross etc. than any American or Eastern European author I've ever read. If you like the style, this is a bonus; if you don't, it's a strike against.

While more intimately tied into the setting than the first book, The Fractal Prince also does passably as a standalone work, plot-wise.

Overall, it's a continuation of an ambitious work, but one that doesn't quite reach its own goals.

Three out of five.